Ledger is a personal finance management app that enables users to log and track their income and expenses. Users can create entries by specifying the transaction type (income or expense), amount, category (e.g., groceries, salary, entertainment), and date. The app includes a summary screen for a quick overview of finances and a detailed transaction list for reviewing all logged entries. Users can edit or delete entries as needed, ensuring accurate record-keeping. FinanceFlow helps users stay on top of their budget with a clear and organized interface.
The database structure consists of two tables: entry and category. The entry table stores individual records with fields like ` entryid ` (` primary key `), ` name`, ` amount`, ` date`, and `categoryID` (`foreign key`), while the category table stores categories with fields like `_id` (` primary key `), ` categoryName`, and ` icon`. The `categoryID` in the entry table is designed to link entries to specific categories, enabling categorization and organization of data. This structure ensures efficient data management and retrieval based on categorized relationships.
- Issue: Users may not be immediately aware of changes to their balance after adding or editing a transaction, as there is no clear feedback.
- Recommendations: Implement a visual or auditory feedback system (e.g., a confirmation message or animation or redirect to the Balance overview) to inform users when their balance updates.
2. Match Between System and the Real World
- Issues: None
- Recommendations: None
3. User Control and Freedom
- Issues: Users might want to create their own categories rather than use the predefined ones.
- Recommendations: Introduce a feature to add and delete your own categories.
4. Consistency and Standards
- Issues: The "Your Balance" and the name of the transaction do not share the same font
- Recommendations: Standardize all texts to use the same font, and color scheme for a cohesive user experience.
5. Error Prevention
- Issues: Users might enter invalid data, such as symbols as the amount, without receiving a warning, leading to potential errors.
- Recommendations: Add validation checks and warnings to prevent users from entering incorrect data, ensuring errors are caught before submission.
6. Recognition Rather Than Recall
- Issues: Users may need to remember details about past transactions, such as categories or dates, which could increase cognitive load.
- Recommendations: Display a detailed transaction history with categories and dates visible at all times, reducing the need for users to recall information.
7. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
- Issues: Users may find it time-consuming to navigate through multiple screens or steps to perform common tasks, such as adding or editing transactions.
- Recommendations: Ensure that all frequently used actions, like adding or deleting transactions, can be completed in as few steps as possible, with clear and accessible buttons for quick access.
8. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
- Issues: The interface might include too many visual elements or colors, which could distract users from focusing on their primary tasks, such as managing transactions or checking their balance.
- Recommendations: Ensure that the design remains clean and focused by using a limited color palette and removing any unnecessary decorative elements, keeping the interface visually simple and task-oriented.
9. Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
- Issues: Error messages may not clearly explain what went wrong or how to fix it, leaving users confused.
- Recommendations: Provide detailed error messages in plain language, including actionable steps to resolve the issue.
10. Help and Documentation
- Issues: Help and Documentation may be important and nice to have but out of scope for this version of the design.
- Recommendations: For now, focus on maintaining the clarity and simplicity of the current help documentation. If these advanced features are considered in future updates, ensure that corresponding help resources are developed to support them.
- Participant 2 gave a lower score of 5, which aligns with their feedback about difficulty finding categories and longer task completion times.
- The chart reinforces the overall positive perception of the app's usability but highlights the need to address specific pain points for users like Participant 2.
- Four out of five participants found the categories and rated their usefulness highly (scores of 4 or 5).
- Participant 2, who did not find the categories initially, still rated their usefulness as 4, suggesting that they recognized the potential value once they located them.
I really enjoyed working with Florian on this project. Combining our strengths helped us create a functional and user-friendly app. Usability testing was particularly rewarding, offering insights into UI/UX design I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Watching real users interact with the app revealed areas for improvement I might have missed. This experience deepened my appreciation for user-centered design and the importance of testing in creating a polished product.
