Overall it is a good looking and fairly slick first pass at this. It would seem that you are on the right track for a simple account management system.
That being said criticism is the best way to make a product better so here are things that I would change:
1. Do not force the user to enter a dollar sign every transaction. If I want to say "10 sandwich" assume that because there is only one number that is the dollar amount. It does not seem like much but it saves two keystrokes for every entry. It's the little victories that make a user feel good about using the service.
2. Make the please wait windows go away. It is very jarring. That task should be handled in the background and updated via some Javascript.
3. Get rid of the flash and use a Javascript library for the graphs. Unless you are offering video there should be no need for flash.
Thanks. Yes, we're looking into making no 1 and 2 happen asap.
We've look at few JS libraries, but, they're not as good looking as Flash one. What is the major drawback of Flash you think? Isn't most people's machine got Flash installed these days considering YouTube etc? Thanks
It's pretty easy to do number 1. use a regex ([0-9]*) and check if there is more than one group of matched values. If there is more than one group then you can either error it out or do some more sophisticated checking(i.e. 100 meal at 10:50pm, two numbers but easy to discern what the intent was) number two is a bit more difficult but still fairly easy.
Comments
Overall it is a good looking and fairly slick first pass at this. It would seem that you are on the right track for a simple account management system.
That being said criticism is the best way to make a product better so here are things that I would change:
1. Do not force the user to enter a dollar sign every transaction. If I want to say "10 sandwich" assume that because there is only one number that is the dollar amount. It does not seem like much but it saves two keystrokes for every entry. It's the little victories that make a user feel good about using the service.
2. Make the please wait windows go away. It is very jarring. That task should be handled in the background and updated via some Javascript.
3. Get rid of the flash and use a Javascript library for the graphs. Unless you are offering video there should be no need for flash.
Thanks. Yes, we're looking into making no 1 and 2 happen asap.
We've look at few JS libraries, but, they're not as good looking as Flash one. What is the major drawback of Flash you think? Isn't most people's machine got Flash installed these days considering YouTube etc? Thanks
It's pretty easy to do number 1. use a regex ([0-9]*) and check if there is more than one group of matched values. If there is more than one group then you can either error it out or do some more sophisticated checking(i.e. 100 meal at 10:50pm, two numbers but easy to discern what the intent was) number two is a bit more difficult but still fairly easy.