User interface for personal accounting

Vasilij Femec (2008) User interface for personal accounting. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

This diploma work describes a method for user interface development for an application Bilanca that is intended for a review of personal financial flows. It is a simple application that subtracts outcome from income and shows the current financial state. The work begins with a detailed analysis of the best possible user interface options that give the most comfortable user experience. This is followed by the implementation in a Delphi environment. The results show that even a simple application like Bilanca takes a lot of coding to produce a flawless user interface. The author points out that users would normally use Microsoft Excel when trying to solve a problem like the one solved by Bilanca. As he analyses the Excel's user interface and results from the literature, some possible improvements are found and used in the practical implementation. The resulting application is focused on solving only the specific user problem, namely the management of personal financial flows, and gives a better user experience than Excel. The diploma work contains a research of literature on user interfaces, definition of a typical user of Bilanca, prototype development, user experience analysis with Excel, new ideas for improving the user interface, and finally the development of Bilanca in a Delphi environment together with a description of difficulties that were found. It concludes with a description of the process of testing Bilanca with random users which shows that the work has been successful and suggests some new ideas for improvement.

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