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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 "" () 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 "" and "" () and () 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.
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This design incorporates much of the efficiency from Design 2, with some added features. The The UI emphasizes adding new expenses as a separate task, as tracking expenses is most important to the student user and it should thus be distinct and easy to find. The The home screen for the returning user features entering expenses and viewing budgets (included shared budgets) - this feature emphasizes what both our student and parent user groups value the most, so increases the efficiency of the UI. The The user can again edit all previous expenses and can change both who can see his budget and whose budgets he can see, which makes the UI much more safe. This UI also incorporates cancel options for many of the editing tasks, which makes the design more safe . as well (a user who accidentally deletes expenses or email addresses can simply click "Cancel" to avoid saving this change). Learnability is somewhat increased in this design over Design 2 (with the very notable exceptions of sharing and editing a budget); important features have very clearly labeled buttons and textfieldstext fields.
Some features of the interface, such as the share Share feature, may be less learnable. The share feature is accessible only from the main “view” budget screen (Screens screens 5, 6, 7, 8), so it is not apparent that this feature exists when the user first enters the app in Screen screen 2. The The path to edit your a budget (which you do after entering the view mode) is not obviously clear and is thus not very learnable - we made this decision because a user will likely not edit his budget often, but it still could be improved. Screens Screens 5 and 6 present something of an efficiency problem for returning users because they display a large amount of data to scroll through - the user's desire for this data is not yet clear to us.
This UI removes the idea of income or recurring expenses. We’re We’re not yet sure how important tracking rollover budget is for users, or if they would want to be able to set prefer setting up recurring expenses like the rent or enter simply entering rent each month as they write their check. We We think that perhaps the ability to setup recurring expenses and income make makes the user less careful with how he tracks his budget. For For example, if you track your net balance instead of how closely you’re sticking to your month budget, you might overspend but not really see that it’s a problem, or if you enter rent as a recurring expense you lose the act of physically entering it in each month, which naturally reminds you that you’re losing that money. The The idea of keeping a rolling “balance” and recurring expenses are definitely two features we believe need to be explored in user testing.
To summarize: this design is designed to emphasize the tasks that we believe both of our user groups value most - entering expenses (students) and viewing someone else's budget (parents). In an effort to design the UI to emphasize those features, we made design decisions that increased the learnability and efficiency of the UI in some places and decreased it in others. Overall, this design is the most safe safest of our three designs, but extensive user testing is needed to see if the decisions we made about which parts of the tasks are important were the correct decisions.