Audience and issues

KMyMoney – Audience and Issues Statement

Product

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.  Key features are:

1.       It uses double entry accounting principles to ensure accounts are kept in correct order

2.       Strives to be easy to use

3.       Provides all important features commercial systems provide.

Audience

KMyMoney strives to be the easiest open source personal finance manager to use, especially for the non-technical user. The audiences for this usability test are novices both in terms of domain knowledge (personal finance management) and in tool skills (Linux environment). They will satisfy the following requirements:

·         Should have used Linux:

o   Used it in past,

o   Could at least browse, and navigate through file structures in Linux.

o   Using it currently but currently use Windows or MAC more often.

·         But are primarily Windows or MAC users

·         We are looking at novices interested in using of personal finance management software. So, we are looking at user who are interested but have not extensively used any personal finance management software like MS Money, iMint etc. So the user should:

o   Should have an active bank account

o   Should be familiar with online banking

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

o   May have tried but not used personal finance management software for more than a month or recently (in last 2 months)

o   Attempted to create a budget for their finances in any form

o   Attempted to track income and expenses in any form

Issues

For this usability study we are focusing on 2 of the main features of the product: Transactions and Budget. 

The main issues we would like to focus in this study are Terminology, Task flow and Navigation.

Terminology:  We would like to test if the software gives sufficient assistance (with the tool tips) or is intuitive to a novice user in dealing with various terminology and icons that are used like: ‘Transfers’, ‘Reconciliation’, ‘Ledger’, ‘Clear’, ‘Records’.

·         KMyMoney uses double entry accounting principles. Some of the terminology like Reconcile and Non-Reconcile that comes with it are not common terminology in current online banking scenarios and could be confusing to the user.

·         In the software the states Clear, Non-Reconciled and Reconciled are labeled as C, NR and R without any assistance.

Task flows: We would like to test if the task flows are easy for the user to follow or not. Particularly the tasks like entering a scheduled transactions and creating a budget seems to be confusing for the following reasons:

Scheduled transactions:

·         After creating a scheduled transaction, the way to enter it is to go to home page, or by right clicking it, which may not be intuitive. Also, the right click option calls current month transaction as next transaction.

Budget:

·         Creating a budget brings in the categories for the budget as already chosen during the initial KMyMoney setup that could be confusing as the user might want to change this depending on his current budget plan.

·         Any changes to the categories at this point require the user to jump out of the context of budget creation and set up categories separately.

·         Also in this case the categories are wrongly referred as accounts.

Navigation:  There are a number of problems that affect smooth navigation in KMyMoney application.

·         Some of the elements might be bit hard to find. Some of the options are hidden under right click. For example, the option to change year for creating budget for a different year other than the current, is hidden under right click.

·         Also there are issues across the UI with tab and button interaction as the user tries to navigate through different types of transactions or budget time periods.

o   Switching between tabs doesn’t give sufficient feedback to indicate the exact function it supports. For example, to creating a new transaction if an older transaction is already selected and user clicks on the tab to choose a different transaction type and then tries to click the ‘New’ button to create the new transaction, the software does not support this task flow. The software upon clicking the tab already enters the “new” transaction creation mode and disables the new button. This happens while the user is not explicitly made aware of the already created new entry that is ready to be added with more details. This kind of interaction where the state is entered and ‘new’ button is disabled also happens in budget creation task flow.

o   In Budget creation for monthly basis, the first month’s entry is also the ‘monthly value’. This could be confusing as January’s value field is used for 2 different purposes which may not always be holding same value.

o   Viewing the created budget is split away from the context of budget creation. It is inside ‘reports’ a label which may not clearly spell out to the users ‘budget view’ hence breaking the navigation. 

o   Budgets icon is below the fold.

o   Calculator and new budget icon are same and close to each other

o   Green check mark to enter the budget is not logically placed enter layout.