MoneyManager - GR2
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Team members: Stephanie Chang, Qian Long, Isabella Lubin
Scenario
Luke was born on May the 4th, and is a 19-year-old just entering the Imperial Academy. He is very excited to get away from his family’s farm and begin an exciting new chapter of his life, majoring in Aeronautics and Astronautics and exploring the wonderfully colorful neighborhood of Mos Eisley. However, Luke’s father, Vader, is worried about his son going out on his own. In particular, although Vader trusts Luke not to squander the family fortune, Vader would like to guard against Luke accidentally spending more than he needs to buy groceries, room decorations, or drinks at the local cantina. Vader and Luke agree that Vader will pay for Luke’s housing and tuition, while Luke will have an initial monthly budget of 300 credits for textbooks, meals, and other personal expenses.
Yoda, Luke and Vader’s wise neighbor, tells Vader and Luke about the MoneyManager app, which Luke can use to create a budget and keep track of his expenses. Luke downloads the MoneyManager app on his Galaxy smartphone and creates an account with his skywalker@imperial.edu email address. Luke creates a budget for his first month at the Academy with the categories of “Food”, “Clothing”, and “Recreation” and sets the initial balance in his MoneyManager app as 300 credits, with a recurring allowance of 300 credits at the start of each month. For the given month, he assigns 175 credits to “Food”, 75 credits to “Clothing”, and 50 credits to “Recreation”. Luke then gives his father access to view his budget (by sharing it with iamyourfather@deathstar.com) so his father knows that he is spending his money responsibly and so his father can see if Luke needs more funds. Because Vader has not yet created an account with MoneyManager, he receives an email prompting him to create an account. He does so, and is then able to view his son’s budget.
As the month progresses, Luke inputs his various expenses. He spends 40 credits a week at the grocery store and inputs the expenditure into the app while standing in the checkout line, and spends 50 credits on a new uniform at a local clothing store (again inputting the expenditure while in the checkout line). In the third week of the month, Luke spends one memorable night gambling with bounty hunters at the local cantina and loses 50 credits (with another 20 credits spent on drinks). In the morning, he enters the 70 credits as an expense under “Recreation”. Seeing that MoneyManager reports his “Recreation” balance as negative, Luke then has to rebudget, leaving himself with 55 credits for “Food”, 5 credits for “Clothing”, and 0 credits for “Recreation”. Concerned about his ability to get through the rest of the month, Luke asks his father to view his budget and consider giving him more money.
Vader logs into MoneyManager and views Luke’s budget. Seeing that his son has spent 70 credits in one night on recreation (but remembering his own college years), he agrees to give Luke another 50 credits for the month. Luke modifies his budget to include this new allowance and wisely does not return to the cantina that month.
Designs
Design 1
Screenshots: (1) Welcome screen; (2) Registration; (3) Log in; (4) Home page; (5) Create/modify budget; (6) Enter income/expenses; (7) View budget as summary list; (8) View budget summary details; (9) View budget as graph; (10) View budget history; (11) View budgets shared with you; (12) Share budget
Analysis
Design 2
Screenshots: (1a) Welcome and login; (1b) Welcome and registration; (2) View budgets / home; (3) Create/modify budget income; (4) Enter new income/expenses; (5) Edit old income/expenses; (5a) Edit individual expense popup; (6) View budget for current month; (7) View budget history; (8) Share budget
Walk-Through For Our Scenario of Design 2:
Luke logs into the moneymaker app and is greeted by screen 1a. He selects “register” and is lead to screen 1b. He enters his email (skywalker@imperial.edu) and creates a password, then selects register. He is lead to screen 2, where he selects “budget” (note that this is not “Your Budget”). He is then lead to screen 3. In the income box he adds 300.00 and sets it to occur monthly.. Under the “food” category he enters $175, under clothing he enters $75, and he adds a new category that he calls “recreation” and assigns $50 (all of these per month). He selects “Save Budget”, which returns him to Screen 2.
Luke wants to share his budget with his father, so he selects “Your Budget”, which leads him to Screen 6. He selects “Share Budget”, which leads him to screen 8. He enters his father’s email iamyourfather@deathstar.com and hits “Share Budget” (Vader ignores this email for a while). Luke quits his app. Periodically throughout the month he adds his new expenses by signing onto the app (which brings him from Screens 1a->2), clicking on “income/expense”, and adding the expense in screen 4 ender expense, selecting the appropriate category, entering the amount, leaving the “Recurring” setting as “Once”, and clicking “Save Income and Expenses”.
When Luke spends too much money at the Cantina, he logs into his MoneyManager app (Screens 1a->2) and selects “Budget”, which leads him to Screen 3. He re-allocates his budget, allocating “Recreation” $70, “Clothing” $55, and “Food” $175. He then asks his father to give him more money. Vader decides to finally check out his son’s budget before making his decision, so he creates an account (Screens 1a->1b->2) He then selects “Luke’s Budget”, which leads him to screen 6. From screen 6 he navigates over to view the history of spending by clicking on “History”, which leads to Screen 7 (since his son has only used the app for one month, this graph would only have a single point for each category and would thus not be very interesting.) Vader decides to give his son an extra $50 this month, and tells him so. Luke logs into his MoneyManager app (Screens 1a->2) and selects “Income/Expense”, where he adds a new one time income of $50 and clicks “Save Income & Expenses”. Since this is a one-time income, he does not adjust his budget.
Analysis of Design 2:
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 the app. 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 inputted, and you can change who you’ve saved your budget with at any given time which gives the user greater control about who can see his budget at any time.
In introducing an actionbar 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 user’s 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.
Overall, this UI prioritizes efficiency (and to some degree safety) over learnability. This is good for our student users, but not as great for our parent users, so user testing would help determine how well they're able to cope with this compromise.
Design 3
Screenshots: (1a) Welcome and login; (1b) Welcome and registration; (2a) Home screen for users without a budget; (2b) Home screen for users with a budget; (3) Create/modify budget categories; (4) Enter expenses; (5) View summary of budget; (6) View expenses for specific category; (6a) Edit individual expense; (7) View budget history; (8) Share budget