UX Notes : The Long Road to the Obvious Solution.
The best UX solves are ones that seemed hard at first but when the solution finally comes out its obvious to everyone.
I was the iOS engineering lead (now the web lead) for Level Money. It’s a budgeting app that divides your discretionary spending up by the days in the month and shows you what to spend each day. So if you have $300 at the end of the month after paying your bills then you’d have $10 a day. The solution the team came up with before I joined was to break out total available money by day, week and month. Here’s a screenshot of Level Money version 1.0.
As you can see it seems fairly straight forward. Three pokè balls, one for each interval. But there are a few UX issues with the original implementation. Take a sec and see what you can spot, then scroll down for the issues we heard from users.
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Remapping User Context
There was some fairly consistent feedback from users about confusion on this screen. The first was, “What is a week?”. The spending pattern we saw with people was that they would spend less during the week and heavier on the weekend. So in order for a spending week to give you a clearer picture it starts with light spending on Monday and ends with more spending on the weekend (ending Sunday). For users to understand this we had to clear up the confusion or change to a week interval they were expecting.
The next issue on the week pokè ball was that we had a monthly budget. But weeks don’t always align with the end of the month. There multiple options to correct this but the choice was made that the last week of the month was only until the last day of the month. This is also a hard concept to explain to users.
The last issue was on the monthly bubble. Many people can’t tell you what date is today. That makes it hard to really get a sense with the monthly pokè ball if you’re doing good or off track.
Public Attempts to Correct
To address these issue we had a FAQ that explained it all but people still expressed frustration on iTunes reviews and in support emails. The first attempt to fix this was to implement a ticker tape. This could share light copy with users to explain some of these details. Here’s what it looked like:
This fix was live in production for a couple months. But I wasn’t satisfied with it. After weekends going over issues and multiple sketches of possible solutions, I finally settled on the solution we have to today. I proposed it to the team and we put it out in the app. Since then we’ve stopped getting questions about how weeks work. The month information is also much more actionable. Take a second and see if you come up with the same solution or if you found a better solution before scrolling down. (Our current users should already know what’s coming.)
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The Aha Moment
The final solutions was to show how many days are left in the current week, month and the date. This solved the Monday-Sunday week issue and the end of month week issue in a single shot.
The month Poké ball also sets a better context to ground the user. They can see exactly how many days are left in the month and how long their money should last.
The daily Poké ball shows the today’s date to reinforce what today is. The goal is to ground users between now and important dates that are coming up. Dates like birthdays, when vacation starts or a party is coming up that they are looking forward to. This provides relevance to what users might need to do today, like buy a birthday present, for the future date they are anticipating.
A good UX solution is rarely obvious at first. Lots of thought, iteration and weighting trade-offs go into creating that solution that seems “obvious”. It takes a team and focusing on the user’s situation to make the experience better. The key trait that sets apart good UX designers from great UX designers are being able to truly empathize with all different types of users and throw out a million ideas to find the one that is “obvious”. It’s a lot of little details that help guide users. By striving for the little things designers, developers and the business owner can better connect with users and make better experiences.
