Robin Harrington's entry to the accounting software realm, MyAccounts, is a small but useful utility for managing one or more bank accounts. While there are certainly more robust programs available for this purpose, MyAccounts is a perfectly acceptable solution for those who don't need all the bells and whistles (or added expense) of a higher-end package.

While the program is functional and complete, a redesigned interface would improve the user experience a great deal. Since a discussion of every detail of such a redesign might be a tedious, this review is centered around some general design issues that, when applied to MyAccounts, will reveal the program's inherent power and functionality.

A First Look

When the user first opens MyAccounts, he is taken to the main screen shown in Figure 1.

This window contains nearly all of MyAccount's functionality, and it is apparent upon first glance that the program has a lot to it. However, as an interface designer, it is important to step into the user's shoes... and at this point, the user is saying, "What do I do now?" My first impulse was to look for help screens, and we'll discuss those later on. While help screens can be very useful, the best interfaces don't need them: there are things a programmer can do to show the user what to do without spelling it out.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the enabling and disabling of buttons (disabled buttons have a gray appearance and cannot be clicked). Going through the buttons and other controls in this window, I found that none of them were applicable yet. Most of them, when clicked, displayed a dialog box explaining why I couldn't use them yet. Rather than taking this "try it and see if it works" approach, I would find the interface much clearer if these buttons were disabled. If this were the case, the enabled button—the button for creating a new account—would stick out as the obvious choice.

With something as simple as disabling buttons until they become applicable, a programmer can guide a user through the operation of a program. There is, however, and even clearer way to get a user started with a new program: provide an assistant-like "walk through." When the program starts, it can check to see if it's preferences file exists. If there is no prefs file, it's appropriate to assume that the user just launched the program for the first time. An assistant can guide the user through setting up accounts and categories before showing the main screen.

Window Design

As I mentioned before, upon seeing the main window, the user is immediately made aware of the power and functionality of the program. A window that is full of controls can be confusing to the user, though. Designing windows to be unconfusing while still functional is certainly one of the challenges of modern interface design.

In my opinion, the main window of MyAccounts is too crowded, and has too many controls. (This can be seen when the user switches to another window... it takes a long time for all the controls to be disabled and re-enabled.) How can this be fixed? We should determine what the primary purpose of the window is, and look at the possibility of moving some of the other items to other windows.

In looking at Figure 1 again, it seems that the primary purpose of the window is to enter, edit and view transactions. Once the program is set up, the user will probably not create accounts or edit categories too often, so these might be moved to other windows. They can then be accessed by buttons in this main window, or—better yet—menu items. Once the top part of the window is removed, the remaining window is easy to understand (and easier to fit on the screen!).

There are a few other minor issues pertaining to this window that I'd like to point out:

• The spacing and layout of the controls in this window can lend a lot to the appearance of order and cleanliness. It's worth reading Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to learn more about this, but a good start is to make sure that spacing between items is consistent. For instance, why not make the listboxes in the "Accounts" and "Categories" tabs the same size? The buttons can then be spaced so they line up with the edges. Also, items should not be placed too close to the edge of the window or their tab panel.
• The used of different fonts and sizes should be considered. While the buttons should remain in the System font, the listboxes might be more useful and elegant if set in the application font (usually Geneva 10). Because of it's placement and it's use of a smaller version of the System font, the "Print only the last month" checkbox looks like it might have been added as an afterthought.
• The Initial Balance and Final Balance amounts are shown as editfields, which give the impression that they can be typed into. It might be better to display these as regular static text items.
• The user can select the account he wishes to look at by choosing the Account number from the menu. It may be easier for the user if the accounts could be selected by name or description, since that might be easier than remembering the account number.

Menus and the Document Interface

MyAccount's menus are shown in Figure 2.

Most of these menu items are clear enough, but they are not where most Mac users expect them to be. This consistency among programs is one of the primary strengths of the Macintosh interface. Here are the changes that should be made:

• In the File menu, the "Printer Settings" menu item should be renamed "Page Setup..." and placed between "Save" and "Quit." A "Print..." item should be added under the "Page Setup..." item (this would replace the "Print" buttons in the main window). The "Print..." menu item should be given a shortcut of "P".
• All programs should have an Edit menu, and the Edit menu would be especially useful in this program to cut, copy and paste text. (MyAccounts was written in REALbasic, and I happen to know that a functional Edit menu is automatically provided for new projects.) The "Clear All" menu item should be moved to the Edit menu, and it should not use the "C" shortcut... that is used for "Copy." (In fact, as it stands, any user who tries to copy text with this shortcut will be surprised to find the program asking whether or not he wishes to delete all his data!)
• The Transactions menu can be expanded to include all the functions available in the Transactions section of the main window. It is always a good idea to have functions like this exist in a menu, even if they are duplicated by a button in the window. I'm not sure what the "Display" item does... I could never get it to be enabled. The "Clear" function might be effectively renamed "Remove Transaction" or at least "Clear Transaction" to differentiate it from the "Clear" item in the Edit menu.
• The About menu is actually not needed; the first item in this menu should be renamed "About MyAccounts" in placed at the top of the Apple menu. The other two items should be placed at the top of the Help menu.

Looking at the File Menu, one can see the way that MyAccounts handles saving data to disk: account data is automatically saved to a single data file when the user selects Save or when the user Quits the program. While this works, most users expect to be able to save their file in a certain folder of their choosing. This necessitates a "Save As..." command (with which the user can select a place to save the file) and an "Open..." command (with which the user can choose a file to open). A "New" command and a "Close" command should be added as well. This type of document handling takes a little more effort for the programmer, but it provides the tools that users are used to in a Macintosh program.

Help!

The Help functionality in MyAccounts is contained in the "About" menu. Each of these menu items displays a tabbed window explaining various aspects of the program. Here are some suggestions to improve upon this:

• As I mentioned above, the help items should be placed under the Help menu. A frustrated user may not have the patience to look elsewhere!
• Some of the topics under help may be short enough to place in their own dialog box (like Registration information), but others should probably be placed in a different format. Consider Apple Help, which uses HTML documents that can be created in any web editor program. Apple's web site has more information about this technology.
• Regardless of what help is available in the program, it is always a good idea to have some sort of documentation separate from the program. This documentation can be in the form of a SimpleText document, a PDF document, one of many standalone documentation programs like DocMaker, or even as text clipping files. Users often do not feel comfortable opening a program until they have read something about it.
• Balloon Help (OS 9) and Help Tags (OS X) are also good to include, and are easily added in REALbasic.

A Few Final Points

Here are a few other notes that don't fit elsewhere in the review:

• MyAccounts uses popup menus in many places to good effect. When these are used, however, they should never appear empty. If the user hasn't selected anything yet, choose the top item for him and let him change it if he likes.
• The main window should have a close box in the upper left hand corner. If there is a "Close" menu item in the File menu, this close box should close the window. If there is no "Close" item, clicking this close box should quit the program.
• When the program is run, it creates a preferences file in the same folder as the program. It is customary to save these files in the Preferences folder of the current System Folder. (REALbasic has an easy way of finding the pathname of the Preferences folder.)
• "Error" and "Caution" dialog boxes should always have an icon. Greg Fiumara's Error Message article explains this in detail.
• There are several places in MyAccounts where the terminology is a little confusing. One example of this is the use of "Submit" as a replacement for "OK" in buttons that close dialog boxes. In this case, the user might wonder what is being submitted, and where it is being submitted to. Using the commonly accepted words and phrases in this regard will help the user recognize the program's functions more easily.
• Whenever clicking a button or selecting a menu item brings about a request for more information, the button or menu item name should end with periods of ellipsis ("...").
• The current web page for downloading MyAccounts is an Apple iTools default page. It would be useful to have a web page including an explanation of what MyAccounts is, some screenshots of the program, contact information, and instructions for downloading.

MyAccounts is obviously the product of an enormous amount of work, and as a compact money management utility it has a very nice feature set. In my opinion, a redesign of the interface will make this program even more functional and powerful for the user.

Links

MyAccounts download page
http://homepage.mac.com/robinmh/

Interface Mafia Review: Designing Helpful Error Messages
http://www.interfacemafia.org/articles/200109/200109-ar0001.shtml

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