Tracking Money in Savings Account

Phil Longstaff plongstaff at rogers.com
Mon Dec 20 14:12:12 EST 2010


If gnucash were a commercial product such as Quicken or Quickbooks, there would 
be people whose job it is to define how the user will interact with the 
program.  Human/computer interaction is a specialized field that most developers 
and users have (unfortunately) no training in.

Let's use an example.  Daniel, I think it is you who has asked for a cash-flow 
forecasting mechanism.  I think the response has been that I as a developer need 
to know how it should work.  This needs to start with: what will the user expect 
to see?  A report?  Multiple reports?  A dialog box with info?  Line or bar 
charts?  How will the user initiate the operation?  How will the user select 
what accounts/transactions/scheduled transactions/whatever will go into the 
operation?  For that matter, what *will* go into the operation?  Could include 
just scheduled transactions.  Could include forecasts based on past 
transactions.  Gnucash and most open-source software is developed on the 
"scratch your itch" methodology - I developed a new format for a 
budget-to-actual report which gave me the information I personally need - it 
scratched my itch.  It won't be included in 2.4.0 but should be in 2.4.1.  With 
luck, other people will find it useful, or will have suggestions that I can make 
to adapt it to their use.  I have other issues with some of the reports, and I 
will make changes to make gnucash work better for me.  With luck, other people 
will find it works for them, too.

Unfortunately, when you have developers do the work in this manner, the step of 
analyzing human/computer interaction may not be well thought through because 
that is not the developer's strength.  For example, creating a report, then 
editing the options is how gnucash does a report.  To me, this is backwards.  
However, it may have been easier or the developer just did it that way.

How should a user suggest an improvement?  It needs to start with the concept.  
I haven't been tracking this thread too closely, but it seems to be involved 
with the envelope method of budgeting.  OK.  Think through how you would set up 
the envelopes using gnucash's accounts.  What works easily and what doesn't?  
What new capabilities/reports might be useful?  As a developer, I can help you 
use the gnucash vocabulary to try to develop what you want, but I would prefer 
you can provide a thought-out design (including dialog box layouts if possible, 
even if informal) and workflow.

 Phil
---------
I used to be a hypochondriac AND a kleptomaniac. So I took something for it.




________________________________
From: Daniel Trezub <daniel3ub at gmail.com>
To: stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Cc: Dennis Brakhane <brakhane at googlemail.com>; warlord at mit.edu; Gnucash User 
<gnucash-user at gnucash.org>; Wayne Bird <wrbird at hotmail.com>; Derek Atkins 
<derek at ihtfp.com>
Sent: Mon, December 20, 2010 12:55:05 PM
Subject: Re: Tracking Money in Savings Account

> It may also be the case that once users have specified "I want to be
> able to do THIS" (with "this" clearly defined) we can say "but you
> already CAN use GnuCash to do that -- just not  the way you were going
> about it (the facility was present; just not where you thought).

This is very very common here.

We, as average users, do not share the same line of thinking from the
developers. Sometimes something is extremely logical to the
developers, but it makes no sense at all to the average user. Let's
face it, it's common. In this cases, where the USER perceive something
as difficult or misplaced, how should we proceed to suggest an
improvement? Sometimes it's just a matter of changing an item from one
menu to another or something like this. How should we proceed?

=====
Daniel Trezub
http://www.gameblogs.com.br
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