Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Carlos Sousa

How I came with a real life problem viable solution using my user experience designer skills.

I don’t know about you but there was a time in my adulthood that controlling my expenses started to be, not something I wanted to do but something I needed to do. Mainly endorsed by my wife, I suddenly saw my self in a spot where I had to come up with a very agile way of tracking our expenses.

As a user experience designer I started by doing some research. I know a few people who are masters in tracking expenses, they use an array of apps and methods that work for them but for me, it just sounds awfully complicated and unnecessary. I then turned to the Internet and searched for “Best way to track expenses”. I read articles for newbies, medium and advanced types of tracking apps, webapps, etc. I tried a few of them but while solving something, they added other pain points.

So I had a problem, done a bit of research about it and I started to better understand my constraints:

I had paper receipts;
Most of the money I spend daily is cash;
I needed to input my expense by category, date, establishment and price;
I needed a system where I could read the inputed information very easily;
My wife had to have access so it had to be very simple.

Knowing my constraints was a huge advantage, I had now a better sense of what I needed to research about.

I went to Google once again, this time confident that someone had the same problem I had, so it was going to be easier. I saw and installed apps but there was a problem, most of them had a subscription model that didn’t suit me, I didn’t want to pay for an app before I could really understand if they were fit for purpose.

Some of these apps had an interesting feature, OCR (Optical Character Recognition), if you don’t know what this is, let me explain. You take a picture of a receipt with your phone, it converts to text so you don’t need to type. “This is amazing!” — I thought. “I don’t need to type anything, I just take a picture and it’s done!”.

So with this new idea I started researching about this new technology, even Google was using it for AR and language translation. I was sure this was the way and since Google was using, for sure Google Docs had some integration with it. As far I as know, it hasn’t and most of the apps out there that have this feature, they either take too long to convert an image to a editable format or the subscription model doesn’t work for me.

I felt a bit frustrated, I was almost sure that someone, somewhere had this issue like me and fixed it, the only thing I had to do was adapt it to my needs. I stepped back, looked at my problem again and my constraints… boom eureka!

The solution was so simple and clear that I felt like I had solved one of the world’s biggest problems. By the way, this is what designers feel when they see a solution for a problem.

My solution:

A Google form with a few inputs (Category, Establishment and Value)

The form on mobile view

Google forms generates responses to a Google Sheet (didn’t have to do anything there)

The raw data coming from the Google form.

Created a Pivot table (came across these on my research) that turned all that raw data into what I needed.

The pivot table out of the raw sheet.

It works on mobile, tablet and desktop.

After all of this was setup, I just started inputting data to see if this was going to work, it sounded promising since it was working for me but I had to user test it with my wife, this was now the ultimate test. I gave her the link, she clearly understood what to do with it and showed her the Google Sheet automatically being populated, it was magic and success by the look and smile on her face.

What I have just explained here with my real life example is the double diamond design process. You start with a problem where the first thing you are going to do is Discovery, understand as much as you can about your problem. Next is Define, this is where you start to bring constraints to shape your hypothesis. By now you should have a clear idea of what your problem is, this is called Problem Definition. Now it’s all about Develop (or Design & Test), you try as many ideas to solve your problem definition as possible and test them. By the end of this process you will Deliver a solution that has been researched and tested, validated by users.

The Design Process: What is the Double Diamond? — http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/

I hope you find this article useful in many ways, in case you are curious about how my setup is or about the double diamond design process, ask me questions in the comments area.

Double Diamond Design Process in a real life example was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Double Diamond Design Process in a real life example

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