Markus Hintersteiner
Finance
Needs:
Android 2.3 additionally upwards
Overview:
This app easily helps
users manage their expenses on your own mobile phone and can keep track of
their finances in a handy way. The basic idea is that each expense is directly assigned
to a category to be able to attain detailed statistics as well as helpful
insights. Overall, this app enables to monitor/report your complete spending
effortlessly based on one month/week/year, and reach your saving goals.
From the design principles
1. High Visibility:
This app
keeps the balance of intuitiveness and good-looking; each icon is neat and
without redundancy to affect your decision. First, when you begin to use this
app, a good instruction tells you where to get started. In Figure 1(a), “Tap to
record an expense”. Second, from the swipeable left-side menu, the layout
provides an easy access to the five different sections/ functionalities. The
icons size is pretty good and each concise icon with “blue color background”
informs a user about the current status in Figure 1(b). Also, Overview has an “Arrow”
to remind you next step. In Figure 1(b), after you enter “+”, another small window
pops up to notify. Second, users can easily understand the meaning of these
icons. For example, “Overview” icon in Figure 1(c) allows you to understand the
overview of your weekly/monthly/yearly expenses. Fourth, “Expense Manager” uses
vivid colors to represent different categories in Figure 1(c).
Suggestions: If each category can add a picture to
represent, the interface will be nicer. Also, each cost only selects from 5
different categories, and users are still unable to create new categories and
also cannot create sub-categories.
2. Provide Moderate Feedback:
After you
set lock pattern at startup, if a user enters a wrong answer, Expense Manager
provides an instant and clear feedback “Sorry, try again”, as shown in Figure 2
(a). Second, if you request an action, simple responses message without tedious
and redundant sentences display on the monitor to tell users what they received
and how users work on it. In Figure 2 (b), we try to add one transaction, so
just press “+” button, and a calculator pop out to ask you to key-in your cost,
and press OK, the calculator will disappear and then shows a simple interface
to let user type the related spending information in Figure 2 (c). However,
Expenses Manager did not provide feedback for ‘delete’ action, but this action
is really important, and should provide good feedback for users to think twice.
In this app, once you accidentally press “trash can” button to delete an entry,
this record will disappear and no any chance to go back.
3. Moderate Mapping:
In Figure
1(c), the small pictures of overview and budge and distribution buttons are
difficult for users to know their function, so this is why the developers still
add texts to aid users understand. Second, “Distribution”, the interface uses pie
charts to show the percentage of each category of expenses statistics, as shown
in Figure 3(a). Also, “statistics”, as shown in Figure 3(b), reports each
monthly performance and also can clearly know which month you sent the most or
the least and which months you have exceed the budgets so that users can
control their expenditures next month. It’s very straightforward feature.
Fourth, “Budget”, the interface is clear, and uses light color to show how much
money you can spend, and no explanation but users have similar life experiences
to understand this function, as shown in Figure 3 (c).
Suggestion: Some
people concern the remaining money instead of spending money. If the app can
add one more feature to switch them or the remaining money can be transferred
to next usage, it will be better. Also, the remaining cost bar should be changed to
different colors (now, light grey) or can set a threshold to alert users. If
the expenditure has exceeded the limitation, the app can set a warning to users “You spend too much money!” or change
to red color.
4. Good
Consistency:
The
interface design is internally consistent. In Figure 1(c), Figure 3(c) and
Figure 4, no matter which functions you use, the design layout of all
categories items is the same. Also, if you would to backup/restore your data,
the design is the same as uploading data behavior on the desktop, so the users
can get the hang of it very soon.
5. No
‘Undo’:
If a user taps ‘OK’ or ‘SAVE’ button by
accident, the transaction will be record, but no any ‘back’ button can be used
to recover the task.
6. Prevent Errors:
Expenses
Manager Offers a history and a user can track history or recover previous
versions or change/modify the spending cost and information based on the dates.
7. Provide Shortcuts:
Provide home
screen widget for easier and faster usage.
Other Suggestions:
Also, this
app really needs some types of synchronization of information between devices;
maybe create an account, such as Google plus sign in.
And… not
free!
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