The document narrates the design process of the 'moneymanager' mobile application aimed at helping college students track their bill payment deadlines. It outlines the author's experience in a team-based project focused on user-centered design, detailing brainstorming, ideation, user testing, and the creation of a high-fidelity prototype. The final product aims to improve students' financial habits and prevent late payment penalties, reflecting the author's personal growth and insights gained throughout the design journey.

1. MoneyManager
A mobile solution for keeping track of bill payment deadlines
Bryan Dosono
June 8, 2011
INFO 360
My voyage in moving a concept forward
from an idea to an application.

2. Table of contents
• Overview
• The team selection process
• Brainstorming a question
• Ideation, ideation, ideation
• Narrowing the focus
• Testing prototypes with users
• Creating a design specification
• Filming a video
• The final product
• Reflection

3. OverviewTheme
The overarching
theme of the
project for INFO
360: “User-
Centered Design”
this quarter was
about money: how
people could make
sense of it and how
it is spent.
Purpose
This process book
narrates the visual
story, using
artifacts from my
group’s design
process, that
explains the origins
of our final design
and my role in its
creation.

4. The team selection process
• Unlike other classes I had taken at the
Information School, this was the first one
where I was not allowed to select students to
be in my team. This powerlessness threw me
off during the first week of the course.
• Teams were instead chosen by the
instructors who asked students to fill out a
survey. Based on that survey, students would
be matched accordingly so that there would
be somewhat of an even skillset of technical
and non-as-technical people in each group.
• I was selected to become a member of Team
9 alongside Zach and Kathryn. We all had a
varied skillset in terms of expertise, and we
all got along with each other from the start.
• This was a first design course for all of us,
and we were eager to find out what we were
going to learn within the coming weeks.
Bryan Dosono (Me)
• Project manager
• Coordinate meetings
Zach Griswold
• Developer
• Focuses on details
Kathryn Kuan
• Designer
• Monitors team moral

5. Brainstorming a question
• One of the first tasks we were assigned to do was come up
with three design questions on the topic of understanding
money. I instantly thought of dividing society into three
different categories: college students, working professionals,
and retired adults. For the sake of scope and simplicity, I
decided to exclude children, homeless vagrants, and other
social groups that lack power in the fiscal hemisphere.
• It became obvious to then focus more on the study of college
students and money because I can mostly relate to that social
group. I was not really interested in investing my own time to
design something that would only impact older generations
of people.
• I then shared my thought process with my team mates, who
were also interested in focusing on people our own age. We
then wanted to investigate how college students interacted
with money. One thing that each member in my group had in
common was that we all at one point or another had difficulty
paying bills on time.
• After several rounds of discussion, we decided that we
wanted to explore this topic of bill deadline tracking further.
Then, the question was born: how can undergraduate college
students keep track of their bill payments and deadlines? My
team sought to find a solution.
$
College
students
Working
professionals
Retired
adults
Artifact: written research question

6. Ideation, ideation, ideation
• The next couple of weeks of the course
focused on the concept of ideation. I’ve
always attributed myself to be traditionally
noncreative. However, the lectures and class
activities have guided me to “dream the
impossible” and to not shoot down
farfetched ideas when shooting for quantity
in solutions.
• For example, in one of the class labs, groups
used sticky notes to write down as many
ideas that pop into their heads and
categorize them under their commonalities.
We then took this exercise a step further and
were assigned to come up with 40 sketches
(independent of each other) for potentials
solutions to our design problem.
• Letting go of my old, restrictive mentality of
listing only the practical solutions really
allowed me to come up with a variety of
creative answers. It was then that I learned
about the importance of being open-minded
when it came to problem solving. Artifact: 40 sketched design solutions
Artifact: stacks of sticky note ideas

7. Narrowing the focus
• After each person in my team came up with 40
unique solutions to our design problem, we
combined everything together and had a difficult
time trying to pick just one.
• The following class lab for that week emphasized
the importance of designing under constraints. We
were instructed to create our own versions of Husky
cards, and from that experiment, we learned how
to pinpoint which elements are essential to a
design. From that activity, I was able to discover
what parts of a solution were important to critically
address the severity of the design problem.
• With this new understanding in mind, I evaluated all
of the 120+ combined solutions, and as project
manager, selected the top three. From there, my
team as a whole assessed the feasibility of the
proposed solution and its effectiveness.
• Ultimately, we decided that developing a mobile
application would be the best way to remind
undergraduate students to pay their bills on time.
Smart phones are becoming ever increasingly more
ubiquitous in society, and such devices have the
capability to notify users in a variety of methods
(such as text and email).
120+ unique
design solutions
Mobile
application!
Husky card:
first iteration
Husky card:
second iteration
Husky card:
third iteration

8. Testing prototypes with users
• From here on out, the team started to
delegate certain roles to certain people. As
the project manager, I was in charge of
making sure that application development
was running smoothly. I delegated tasks and
set milestone objectives for the team to
meet on a regular basis so that weekly
deliverables would be submitted on time.
• The team divided the user testing work
equally. Serving as an effective oversight
resource, I made sure to follow up on team
members so that each one found and tested
two separate and random undergraduate
students.
• I also wrote the entire user protocol testing
script that was read aloud to users that
tested high-fidelity prototypes of the
application. I recorded the testers’ feedback
and passed along the information to the rest
of my team mates. The team as a whole then
improved the prototype by assessing the
testers’ suggestions and observations.
Prototype 1 Prototype 2 Prototype 3

9. Creating a design specification
• The design specification is a clear description
of the design problem, project scope, details
about every design, decision made within
the project scope, rationale for and decision
for every design, decision that may affect our
solution’s effectiveness.
• I had various roles within the creation of the
design specification. Specificallly, I wrote and
fine tuned both the problem statement and
the project scope. I also added and filled an
extra section within the specification about
the impact and significance of the
MoneyManager application.
• Moreover, I was in charge with designing the
overall look, feel, and theme of the
specification (this includes the cover page,
heading styles, font preferences, etc.). This
turned out to be a very time consuming job
because I constantly had to fix positional and
stylistic errors every time my team mates
added new content to the document.
Screen shots of specification

10. Filming a video
• After our specification went through several
group revisions, we filmed a complementary
video. This video was assigned to be a
multimedia story, persuading a stakeholder
of our team’s design that they should invest
time, money, and attention to make our
design a reality.
• Filming our video was very straightforward.
All it took was a gung-ho group effort to
meet for one afternoon and capture footage
in one fell swoop. My role in this process was
not only to coordinate the logistics of
meeting, but to also film the video with my
own two hands operating the camera.
• Once my group obtained the video footage it
needed, I arranged for us to meet up at a
computer lab several days later to grab final
“iPhone Simulator” video material to insert
into our film for extra polish. We worked
extremely well on this part of the project,
with everyone performing efficiency. Like a
puzzle, everything fit together smoothly.
Video editing process from
a project manager’s
perspective
Arrange time and
meeting location
Delegate roles for
each person involved
Verify which people
will bring which
materials to the video
shoot
Film the required
footage and double
check to make sure all
necessary shots are
taken
Follow through with
supervising the video
editing process and
oversee any relevant
decision making
Thank and praise
everyone involved for
their efforts in making
the project a success

11. The final product
• My team’s final product is the result of all the
choices we made as a group to address the
design problem. After the end of ten weeks,
we have created a high-fidelity prototype
MoneyManager application for the iPhone
that improves students’ grasp on their
personal finances by reminding them to pay
their bills on time.
• The application is programmed with auto-pay
features for students to take care of their
bills on the go. Students can also very their
synced account balances, as well as view
recent transactions made.
• MoneyManager is an important mobile
application because it can help students
avoid paying late penalties. Moreover, the
use of the application can actually help
students establish great bill payment habits.
Credit scores of college students can actually
be improved as a result of using the
application to paying bills on time.

12. Reflection
In retrospect, I was a bit hesitant about the entire design process. I
started out with a topic that I wasn’t even comfortable discussing
(money) and was forced into working with an entirely new team of
students that I didn’t even select. However, this project—and the
INFO 360 course in general—taught me what it meant to be a
designer.
I have learned that a strong designer is not afraid to think
unconventionally to solve a problem. I have learned that a strong
designer takes risks and is not afraid of failure. I have learned that a
strong designer can emotionally distance himself from his own
ideas, and can effectively articulate rationale for his decisions
between a wide array of audiences. Most importantly, I have learned
that a strong designer knows the difference between getting the
design right, and getting the right design.
I personally found the entire process of designing MoneyManager to
be a humbling and rewarding one. I never would have thought that I
could accomplish so much in just one quarter. I now have a new
found respect and appreciation for anyone in the design industry.
Although my team has yet to discuss the future of MoneyManager
outside a classroom context, I can truly see it becoming an
application available for download in the Apple App Store one day.