Software Product Development: How to build a product: lifestyle
Everything in our life is about how to make things more simple. Moreover, it’s about how to get it to the simplest core. We always find alternative ways for our conveniences. This is how the world is evolving and you can see this case true in almost everything. We have hand to hand food delivery now as to before where you would have to walk to the grocery store. We have invented credit cards for payment conveniences as to before where you would need to carry cash wherever you go.
When building products, we should focus on what it provides to costumers; Does it provide conveniency and amusement to them? How can users take value from the product?
How can we press the importance of budgeting to people around the world. More importantly, how can we make people know where all their money is being spent on. People spend money but not many know what their money is being spent on.
Budgeting has become slightly big in this new evolving world of smart phones. people can keep a budget with them wherever they go! But why are people not using it effectively? why should we keep a budget? these are 4 reasons why you should keep a budget:
- It helps keeps you stay organized
A budget forces you to keep track of your money expenses and it forces you to have a clear goal. Either it be short or long term, but it must be achievable. This is a great practice for becoming a more organized person because you are the one who needs to maintain the budget. - It ensures you don’t spend money on what you can’t afford
When budgeting, you will always know your money progress. This will make you have a clearer insight on what you can and cannot afford and your money will be spent more wisely. - It helps you prepare for money emergencies
Emergencies can always happen around the corner. Unexpected surprises can lead to serious financial loss. setting emergency funds can save you from a life of dept. set realistic goals and start small and smart.
The following will be a PEST analysis on why people should importance budgeting.
PEST analysis
Political : Helps the world to be more concerned on money expenses.
Economical : Economical growth of the country.
Sociological : Makes the society better when you know what you are spending on and this makes people aware of how much they are spending to lessen over paying.
technological : convenience of budgeting which relies on computer software.
Below will be a competitive analysis on different ways to budget and the amount of conveniency and time consuming of the different ways.
How do people feel about budgeting?
The majority of people I have interviewed don’t use an app nor a program that helps you budget. Therefore, I have grouped user interviewing into 2 groups; users who budget, and users who don’t budget. These are the following questions:
group 1: people who do budget
- Do you keep a budgeting list, if so where? (an app, program, or notebook)
- What would you want to change with your current budgeting experience?
- What do you think about a budgeting app correlating to your credit/debit card?
- Has budgeting made you more aware of spending?
- Do you find yourself overspending from your budget?
group 2: people who don’t budget
- Do you keep track of your money expenses, if so, is it done weekly, monthly, or yearly?
- What is stopping you from budgeting?
- Would you consider budgeting if you have never before?
The majority of people do not use budgeting apps. The data I have collected from group one is that majority of the people use their own programs to budget such as Spreadsheet. The data I have collected from group two is that the majority of people don’t see the importance in budgeting and they think it’s a waste of time. There were some who were interested in budgeting but are lazy to start.
How can we make users see the importance in budgeting? by creating a platform that is easy, fun, and worthwhile for people to use. The main consideration for this domain is providing conveniency and good experience to the user with this platform. with this, many factors come to play; the user interface must be clean and easy for users to understand the flow of the app, users must have the best experience while in the app where they don’t have a hard time distinguishing the features, and users must have fun and enjoy the time of using the app.
Agile Development
How do I see my product now Vs. my product when there are millions of users using it world wide?
The scope for my starting app would be where there are complete features of the budgeting app; there will be categories of money expenses such as groceries, rent, transportation, etc. users will input money expenses into the right categories and will be able to check the total amount of money output along with the total amount of individual category expenses.
The scope for my app when there are many users using it would be where there are extra features that make the app more fun to use which would be where users can customize there own colors, add dates to save previous data from earlier week/month/year, where there will be a correlation to your credit card where there will be notifications to the app that you have spent money but then you would have to put the expense into your own category, and a notification to users every month on their savings and expenses.
Wire Framing
Wire framing is extremely important in building a product. It lets you understand the core concepts of the product, in this case, a budgeting app. As in the above picture:
- Users will be able to set dates for their total budget which they can customize to be by day, week, month, or year.
- Users will have a list of money expense genres which they can choose to unhighlight them if they don’t have expenses on that.
- Users will have their main page where they can constantly check where their budget is at.
- Once users have an expense, users will click their genre of the expense and add the information.
- Users will be able to see the expense will affect the budget and they can confirm to add it to their budget.
