Project Proposal

Product Description

KMyMoney is a personal finance manager for KDE(a desktop environment mainly for Unix-like systems). It enables users of open source operating systems to keep careful track of their personal finances by providing a broad array of financial features and tools.

Audience Description

KMyMoney strives to be the easiest open source personal finance manager to use, especially for the non-technical user. The audience for this usability test will satisfy the following requirements:

-          Have used Linux

-          Never used (for more than a month) and have not recently(in last 2 months) used any personal finance management software like MS Money, iMint etc.

-          Have an active bank account

-          Be familiar with online banking

o   check online statements of their bank account statements, pay bills through online banking and log in to it at least twice a month.

Areas of Concern

In this usability test we will be focusing on 2 main features: transactions and budget, these are two of the complex and important tasks enabled by this software.

Transactions:

-          Complex banking terminology and tasks like reconciling a transaction might be confusing.

-          Performing a split transaction task into sub categories or between multiple payees could be confusing

-          Entering the edit mode of transactions  could be confusing

-          Approving a scheduled transaction could be confusing

Budget:

-          Task of creating a budget could be unclear

-          “Save budget file” command  is not shown on the screen

-          Changing budget year could be confusing

-          Labels such as “total balance” and “total value” might be confusing

The basic tasks of getting started with KMyMoney like creating a file, setting up accounts, scheduling transactions, entering few transactions etc. will also be tested because the transaction and budget tasks will be based on them. Concerns in this section of task are:

-          Choosing multiple types of categories could be confusing

-          Some of the inconsistent UI elements such as checkboxes could slow down tasks

-          Some of the finance terminology like “transfers” etc. may need to be readily clarified.