Quicken

Problem Description

When using Quicken to track my finances, I get impatient and tend to make mistakes, because certain actions take far longer than they should. I also get frustrated when I spend some time setting up the interface in a particular way, and when I reload the program the next day, my settings are gone.

HCI Analysis

People who use financial packages tend to use them on a regular basis, and therefore become expert users rather quickly. Borenstein (1994) points out that the designer should be aware this type of user is a "clever, sophisticated, but impatient user".

Quicken's menu structure leaves a lot to be desired. All of the most frequently-used options are under the Features menu or the Reports menu. Because a large number of features are contained in these two menus, most selections are two levels deep in the menu structure. Using pull-down menus that are two levels deep is challenging for users, since they must keep the mouse in a narrow track in order to navigate the second-level menu. Fitt's law (Card and Moran, 1986) predicts that this will be much slower than using a single-level menu, decreasing efficiency.

Many of the items on the Features menu (and some on the Reports menu) have only two items at the lowest level. This center-heavy menu structure ignores the results found by Norman (1991), which states that menus should have the most choices at the top level and at the bottom level.

The Lists menu is a menu of everything that doesn't get used very often. Users seldom create new accounts, categories, classes, or types of securities. Many of the items found on the Lists menu are accessible elsewhere (ie. new accounts can be created from the account register), so the Lists menu hardly ever gets used.

When the program is closed, the states of some of the open screens are saved (such as the account register and the report generator), but other screens are not considered important enough to be saved. This violates Cooper's (1995) principle "Any command is a working set candidate." When a user adds a screen to their working set (the set of items they normally use), the program should keep track of this fact, and open that screen for the next session.

Recommendation

The menu system should be redesigned so that it better reflects usage tendencies. High-frequency items should be at the top of single-depth menus, and low-frequency items can either be placed in two-level menus or simply moved to portions of the system where they are used, following Cooper's (1995) principle of "Build function controls into the window where they are used."

The entire state of the system should be saved when the program is closed, since users tend to perform the same operations every time they use the program.

References

Borenstein, N. (1994) Programming As If People Mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions. Princeton University Press.

Card, S. and Moran, T. (1986) User Technology: From pointing to pondering. in Proc. ACM conf. on History of Personal Workstations, Palo Alto. ACM.

Cooper, A. (1995) About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. IDG Books Worldwide.

Norman, K. (1991) The Psychology of Menu Selection. Ablex Pub. [Chapter 9]

rscherle@cs.indiana.edu

Last modified: Fri Mar 26 13:29:31 EST 1999