Usability Testing: KMyMoney
usability, testing, lab, think-aloud, personal finance management tool, opensource
Project details
The goal of this project is to find usability issues in 2 features of an open source finance management software. The two features were Transactions and Budget.
Product: KMyMoney, provides important finance management features, it is an open source personal finance management software. It uses double entry accounting principles and strives to be easy to use.
Audience: KMyMoney strives to be the easiest open source personal finance manager to use, so the audiences for this usability test were double novices: domain (personal finance management) and tools (Linux).
- They shouldn't have used extensive or recently any personal finance management tools.
- They shouldn't have used extensive or recently any personal finance management tools.
- Should have an active bank account, do online banking and attempted to create a budget or track their finances.
Participants: We recruited 3 participants using convenience sampling recruiting friends. All 3 of them were software engineers, aged between 25-30 years, who have used Linux but are primarily Windows users. Two of three were male. Two of three never used any personal finance management tool, while one used MS Money for a week long time ago. All of them did attempt to track and plan their finances.
Issues: This usability study focuses on 2 of the features of the product: Transactions and Budget. The main issues tested in the study were:
- Terminology:We wanted to know if finance terminology and icons used in the software were clear. E.g.: 'Clear', 'Transfers', 'Reconciliation' and 'Ledger'.
- Task flows: We tested to see if the task flows were easy for the user to follow or not. We particularly looked at process of creating scheduled transactions, reconciliation, creating and viewing budget.
- Navigation: We tested to see if various elements and options in the software were easy to find, e.g.: options under right click. We also tested tabs that were designed as a way to change transaction type.
Methods: Participants were asked to think aloud as they performed the designed tasks in a lab. Interactions with KMyMoney and participants' activity were recorded in a video. The tasks used to test were:
- Creating and paying a monthly rent payment,
- Editing transaction to change state,
- Checking and confirming transactions and
- Creating and viewing a budget.
Sample video from the study
Key Findings and Recommendations:
- Too many pop-ups with hard to follow instructions, they need to be pruned and the instructions need to be clear and crisp. This will make the experience of using KMyMoney a whole lot better.
- In Budget form the data needs to be auto saved without needing user to save a budget created separately. This can greatly help not loosing data if the user misses this intermediate save point.
- Data entry across software needs to be holding values without user having to explicitly hit 'Enter' key.
- In ledger, the entries should be easy to sort, finance terms should have helpful tool tips.
- In Transaction edit form, use of tab to select a type of transaction was confusing. Instead using drop down to select type and then changing the options on the form based on that would help clear confusion of the actual type of entry and prevent editing by mistake.
- Lastly directly viewing a budget created could be an option in the right click of a selected budget.
My learning in this project was in: (i) constructing the test tasks, (ii)conducting and (iii) communicating the test results.
People
- Faculty guide: Prof. Judy Ramey
- Grace Chang
- Pallavi Damera
Links
- Course page: Usability Testing
- Product page: KMyMoney
- Done for: OpenUsability
- Mentions in Opensource community: KDE Promo , Money master Alvaro