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This design greatly reduces the amount of navigation that goes on (for example, the process for viewing a shared budget requires you to simply login and click on the name of the budget); this is optimized for the parent going to view his child’s budget, particularly a parent with multiple children using MoneyManager. This means that this particular version of the app is quite efficient. It includes a safety check that allows the user to go back and edit expenses or income that they had previously input, and users can change whom they've shared their budgets with at any given time, which gives the users greater control over who can see their budgets.
The design also includes (+) and () icons for users to quickly add multiple categories, income, expenses, or email addresses to share a budget with. This greatly increases efficiency - if a user waits until the end of the week to input all accumulated receipts, he would not have to input each item individually and have to navigate back to the same screen multiple times. This feature is very intuitive and thus learnable as well. In addition, the () icons make it easy for a user to recover from the error of adding an extra category, expense, or email, although accidentally deleting an item is not quite as recoverable.
In introducing an action bar to improve navigation, we have taken up a certain amount of space and cluttered up the UI. In user testing, we’ll need to determine whether or not users value having all of the important actions available from every window, or if they really only care about certain actions. Additionally, by using an action bar rather than a main menu, the particular actions are not clearly marked, which reduces learnability (even in the scenario write-up, we noted that the user might confuse what the actions of clicking on “Budget” and clicking on “Your Budget” in screen 2 would do). The expansion feature on screen 6 (to allow the viewer to see detailed expenses in a particular category) means a user could expand all of the options and quickly make the window very long, requiring a lot of scrolling - this is fine for a student who is comfortable enough with apps to scroll quickly and know what’s going on, but is not ideal for a parent.
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