

Ask HN: Review My App - mychipper.com - tallasif

Hi, I am a developer from India. Recently in my spare time I built http://mychipper.com/. This is a simple to use expense tracking tool.<p>There are lot of such tools already available but, for a typical user (read Indian) most of these tools are complex. Simplicity was the motto while building this application. Also accessibility was important for such a tool. So it has already been integrated with Gtalk and has a Mobile view too. Its also present on Orkut as an opensocial application. I am inclined towards taking this product further. What can be done to acquire more users?  I am definitely not a product person. hence, any feedback on the product itself will be of great help.
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nbhat
Make it social. Let people compare their spending habits with other people who
are in the same income category or same spending budget. Ask questions who is
the end user? Is it a person who wants to cut down on the costs or is it
person who is trying to stick to his monthly budget? If so how is the user
going to achieve by using the site? User has to do something after seeing at
the graphs. Make it easier for the user to arrive at that decision. For
example food budget is higher compared to others then you can provide hints to
cut down on the food budget. It may take out the simplicity of the app.. It
might be good to compare how is the person doing with respect last month etc.
Notes field can be made available only if required. Graphs are taking lot of
space. Can be moved left a little bit and show a bigger recent spending list.

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riklomas
I like the simplicity of your app, it's nicely done, love the logo especially!
I would suggest a few things though:

# Drop the bouncy effects on the summary hover as they're just distracting

# Show more than just 3 recent entries, if I'm writing a list of expenses, I
need to see what I've already put in

# Maybe put a category field so I can choose from food, travel, etc. Maybe a
select box in with the "what are you spending on?"

# A date range selector so I can see what I've spent over a particular period

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richesh
Good job, overall I like it. I understand your audience and the need to do
this in a simple format. Mint & Wesabe are US focused and don't cater to your
audience. One thought is to make this available to other audiences - e.g.
Chinese, African, etc. Because similar needs exist in those places and all you
would have to change is language on your site.

My review is going to sound critical, but assume things I didn't mention are
good

My first reaction (in order):

1\. How is this better than Mint or Wesabe

2\. Why would I start inputting things manually when others can crawl it for
me.

3\. "Oh this is for an Indian audience" - make this clear on the site

UI:

\- Bouncy effects are distracting

\- Use row background colors to differentiate between them

\- Red cross is too prominent, grabs attention before anything else

\- Graph is also grabbing attention which it is meant to but use different
palette. You can look at Google Analytics, Woopra, Chartbeat, etc. to get an
idea

\- "Reason" label makes it seem like I can enter a long explanation but the
text field makes it seem like I can enter a short description. Either change
the label to something like "Expense Name" or change the text box.

\- The sliding background on menu items (top and graph) feels jittery and lags
when I move my mouse around too fast. This can be annoying to people with
vision issues. Make it simple hover.

\- Recent Entries should be horizontal width right under summary (same width
as summary), because its the second most important thing I care about on the
page. Inputting expense is a secondary task on a regular visit because when I
have something input I'm going to seek out that form and record my expense.

\- Red flags went up when I saw Sex, Phone, and DoB on the sign-up form. Never
going to give that up to a new site. What are you planning on using this info
for?

\- Chipper on GTalk is another questionable practice. How do we know it's
secure? It's fine as long as there won't be any long term personal data
exchange.

Other thoughts: \- SMS alerts or updates

\- Create a "family" or "group" to track and compete (game like) with others

\- If you get enough traction, give people tips on expense categories (e.g.
Petrol at the gas station near your work is cheaper than the one you use near
your home)

Good Luck. Good job, glad to see people looking to help other markets!

~~~
tallasif
I really have to thank you on this feedback. It was just more than helpful.
You have pointed out issues that my very techie mind had not seen so far. I am
very well taking into account every point you have mentioned. Thanks again.

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annextourist
First up, thanks for sharing your app with Hacker News tallasif. It takes
courage to bring something you made to a place where people will give honest
and direct feedback.

I think you've succeeded in making an app that does one small thing simply.
Congrats. Simple isn't always easy.

I have a usability concern that I haven't seen mentioned here yet. I like that
the keyboard focus jumps to the Reason text box, but I feel that the "What are
you spending on?" box needs more emphasis to be the clear main element of your
app's UI.

The examples that jump to mind are how twitter puts the "What are you doing"
box at the top centre of the app, or how Google puts a lone search box at the
page centre.

Hope this helps.

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Stahir
Very good interface, idea, style, and flow.

As for the purpose of the website, I believe it is a bit painstaking to sit
and enter all the values in as anyone would on excel. This is just a better
looking excel.

Reason why I am saying this is that you need to help improve on the idea,
perhaps have a goal chart, where the user breaks down into percentage what
they want to be spending on what, and you compare everyday to the goal chart.
once they hit the max in their goal chart, they can choose to cut down
spending and meet the goal or spend more and miss their goal.

I don't quite see the benefit if you get what I mean. Here is a tip, go to
livestrong.com it is a website that helps you track your daily calories, look
at their tracking system and draw some ideas that will make the users Want to
use your system. They have an awards system which is also interesting, no
physical reward, just badges your profile earns.

Good work & good luck.

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jeroen
I started writing down some critique, but I think I can summarise: polish it.
UI elements are not aligned, buttons don't work and "mm" doesn't seem like a
valid entry for the month-field.

Oh, and more information about your product and less asking for information
(phone nr?) might make people more inclined to register.

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andrewljohnson
mm is an extremely common placeholder for months in a date.

~~~
jeroen
Sure, but what is it doing in the UI? It isn't a valid option for the
selection.

~~~
tallasif
Thanks for your feedback guys. I think jeroen is right, It should just clearly
say month / year, as the whole idea of the application is to make things
simple. instead of mm/yyyy which is very techie and may not be obvious at all
to the end user.

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chaosprophet
The first thing that struck me was the clean, simple interface. The demo is
quite nice, and viewing expenses as graphs is quite handy. Since you are
aiming at making it extremely simple to use, I suggest you combine all those 4
text boxes (reason, amount, note and date) into one text and use a date time
and currency parsing script to get the details.

As to getting users, you could try viral marketing on twitter, facebook and
orkut. A large number of Indian users (me included) are migrating from orkut
to facebook, so it would be good if you had a facebook app too. Create a
facebook fan page or an orkut community and encourage interaction. All this
will require a significant amount of time though, so make sure you are willing
to spend your weekends on it.

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schindyguy
I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this, but I think the "Chipper now on
Mobile" and "Chipper now on Gtalk" is a great feature but I only realized what
it did after I clicked on it. You should make the user understand that now
"you can submit expenses to your mychipper account with Gtalk and Mobile SMS".
Maybe look at how ping.fm organizes and makes the user understand this type of
functionality.

I like the idea of creating a social aspect to it. Dont throw it their face,
but give them an option to "share" their data and allow them to compare it to
other mychipper users.

But I think you've got a dead simple app and good market to go after.

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roam
Clickable: <http://mychipper.com/>

I like it. Nice and clean, the charts are exactly what I'd need and the
options to view daily and monthly reports are good. Maybe it's a bit too
minimal: use a bit of a gradient on buttons, use alternate background colors
for the expense list; get a bit of color in there. And I'd change the "Reason"
label to "Category".

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hellweaver666
I don't get the GTalk thing... I've made friends with your bot, asked for
'help' got the instructions yet I get no feedback from the bot or any kind of
reflection on my account that I've submitted anything.

If it worked, the GTalk integration would be _really_ handy for me as I have
Gmail open quite a lot.

~~~
tallasif
Hey, Gtalk had a little bit of issue with decimal's. It was a case that just
came to my mind when feedback started pouring in. Its been fixed now. I assume
you also tried entering a decimal value.

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asimjalis
I got a PHP error when I went to the home page

A PHP Error was encountered Severity: Notice Message: Undefined variable:
timezone Filename: geoip/timezone.php Line Number: 941

Otherwise it looks great.

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philjr
It's rounding my cash up / down to the nearest euro/dollar. Now while I could
multiply by 100 to put in 751 instead of 7.51 ... I think it'd be great not
to. Maybe that's the engineer in me :)

~~~
tallasif
Hey, Thanks for pointing this out. As you see out here in India we deal with
round numbers mostly. It just slipped my mind that internationally its a
little different.

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hellweaver666
seems nice so far... question though, I just signed up - why do you "require"
my date of birth and sex for an expense tracking tool?

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antidaily
"reason" seems like a strange entry name. item/service seems more appropriate.

