Off the bat, the first thing I notice is that the sum of balances
seems to be the way that the various charges are kept track of.
I believe that this system makes the spreadsheet less safe to use.
For instance, if Neo wants to pay off his balance to Trinity, he needs to
delete the entries of the spreadsheet to clear the balance. However, if he
made an error along the way, he would need to recover the old version of the
spreadsheet, resolve the error, and revert back to the new version. This
creates issues of the spreadsheet being difficult to recover from errors.
I think that this is a flaw in the choice of usage of a spreadsheet for this
task, as the reactive columns make it difficult to design a way for past charges
to be handled more effectively.
There is also a decent amount of clutter. Presumably, Neo and Trinity actually interact
with the tracker in two main ways:
To add charges to be trackced
To view balances to be settled
The spreadsheet is not optimized for either of these purposes. Use case 1, adding charges,
requires that a user scroll down to the very bottom of the page just to enter the most
recent charge. It is poor design that the most frequent use case for the tracker is also
the most difficult to execute. The second use case is also flawed, as the total that Neo/Trinity
owes is not immidiately obvious because it's nestled between 5 other columns. The information that
prompted the creation of the spreadsheet in the first place, who owes what amount, is unneccesarily
obfuscated by other columns that contain running totals and other computations. The clutter
makes it difficult to perform the few key functions of the tracker, making it very inefficient.
Wireframe
Aesthetics aside, the tracker should include a more immidiate response to the 3 main functions
that a user of the tracker would be concerned with:
Checking their balance
Adding a new charge
Viewing past charges for reference
therefore, the tracker should offer easy access to these 3 functions.
Neo & Trinity's expense tracker
Balance
Neo/Trinity owes Trinity/Neo $amount
This button ^ should lead to a pop-up window
New charge
paid $
for
Past charges
Payer
Payee
Amount
Neo paid for
Trinity
$45.12
Neo paid for
joint charge
$16.55
Joint account paid for
Trinity
$33.75
Neo paid for
Trinity
$45.12
Table should also include a special row for when someone
clears their balance