As you can see it seems fairly straight forward. Three pokè balls, one for each interval. But there are a few UX issues with the original implementation. Take a sec and see what you can spot, then scroll down for the issues we heard from users.

intentionally left blank — scroll on

Remapping User Context

There was some fairly consistent feedback from users about confusion on this screen. The first was, “What is a week?”. The spending pattern we saw with people was that they would spend less during the week and heavier on the weekend. So in order for a spending week to give you a clearer picture it starts with light spending on Monday and ends with more spending on the weekend (ending Sunday). For users to understand this we had to clear up the confusion or change to a week interval they were expecting.

The next issue on the week pokè ball was that we had a monthly budget. But weeks don’t always align with the end of the month. There multiple options to correct this but the choice was made that the last week of the month was only until the last day of the month. This is also a hard concept to explain to users.

The last issue was on the monthly bubble. Many people can’t tell you what date is today. That makes it hard to really get a sense with the monthly pokè ball if you’re doing good or off track.

Public Attempts to Correct

To address these issue we had a FAQ that explained it all but people still expressed frustration on iTunes reviews and in support emails. The first attempt to fix this was to implement a ticker tape. This could share light copy with users to explain some of these details. Here’s what it looked like: