To make a great app for the iPhone or any mobile platform requires a refined piece of software. A mobile app shouldn’t be judged on how many features it has, rather how well the app works as a solution. For Vault, we’ve focuses on eliminating the amount of user input has to do in any and all ways. Take iteration one for example, while a user won’t be editing account information too often, it’s important to not stress the user because they have to enter too much about entering information. The title of the account is surely important, so we allow the user to enter the name using the keyboard. No big deal. For bank name and information though, Amit & I initially planned to allow the user to enter the name, phone number and website of the account. While the calling the bank phone number and accessing bank website is certainly a useful function to build in. A user usually won’t take the time to enter such details on the device, or they’ll be annoyed by the time they do. Instead, we decided to provide the phone number and website of some of the most popular banks. That way the user can just pick “HSBC” or “Bank of America” from a list and be done with setting up that functionality.
For iteration 2, again we’re faced with being able to provide software that can work with as little user input as possible. This time around, the stakes are higher because the user will be adding new transaction rather frequently. So we focused on the single transaction screen where a user will be adding a title, amount, date and whether the transaction is reconciled. Apple has already created great UI elements for entering the date and amount with the UIPickerView class and a switch for reconciling a transactions.
That brings us to transaction title, where again we’re faced with text entry. We certainly want to provide a user the flexibility of entering text as the title, but also something as quick & simple as picking an option from a list. So we intend to combine both ideas, and allow the user to enter in a title, while at the same time allowing to pick a pre-made title. When a user starts to type something like “Groceries”, they’ll see the list of pre-made option shrink so they can pick that option, and choose the text they entered.
So we’ve condensed most input entry to picking option and maybe entering a few characters, but what else can we do to condense a user’s work? Taking a page out of a desktop application, we decided to add a duplicate button. Since many transactions are repeated, it makes sense because most transactions have the reoccurring information.
