Escrúpulos Una piedra en la conciencia del software libre, calidad y la vida misma

I should have posted this long time ago, at least 2 months. Mid last year, Pallavi Damera approached us for a new usability testing of KMyMoney. After some back and forth, it was decided to test on KMyMoney 1.0.2, which was just about to be released at that time, and the budget and ledger areas would be the main focus of the tests. Budget is like the dumb son of the views, having been without maintainer for a long time. and the ledger is the main view to enter information, and therefore the most important one.

To port the ledger fully to Qt4, we'll have to practically rewrite it from scratch, so I was particularly interested on the results for that one.

Well, we got the results in January,and they are not charming, but VERY useful. Here's the summary of the recommendations:

KEY FINDINGS – RECOMMENDATIONS

• Too many pop-ups with hard to follow instructions, they need to be pruned and the instructions need to be clear and crisp. This will make the experience of using KMyMoney a whole lot better.
• In Budget form the data needs to be auto saved without needing user to save a budget created separately. This can greatly help not losing data if the user misses this intermediate save point.
• Data entry across software needs to be holding values without user having to explicitly hit ‘Enter’ key.
• In ledger, the entries should be easy to sort, finance terms should have helpful tool tips.
• In Transaction edit form, use of tab to select a type of transaction was confusing. Instead using drop down to select type and then changing the options on the form based on that would help clear confusion of the actual type of entry and prevent editing by mistake.
• Lastly directly viewing a budget created could be an option in the right click of a selected budget.

You can find the full report here.

We have implemented some of the advices during this time, and we are looking for ways to include other recommendation in our release schedule. On behalf of the whole team, and our users, I want to thank Pallavi and Grace Chang for conducting this study. I hope we can improve KMM so much as to make it worthy of a follow-up.

Next, I should blog about two common usability issues we find, and what we should do to solve them, but right now it's just too late at night.