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Wouldn’t a spreadsheet program be easier and would not require trusting a third party with data about your income and your expenses? Especially since you might

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Wouldn’t a spreadsheet program be easier and would not require trusting a third party with data about your income and your expenses? Especially since you might want to revisit the same sheet over time to add or remove people, add or remove expenses, or change the weighting, specifically without needing to store that data with a third party or maintain a separate sign-in credential to access a history of data.

kohanz 8y ago
You're thinking about this from the perspective of a developer, rather than the population at large. Suggest building a spreadsheet to one of your non-technical friends or family for something like this and you'll get a blank stare.
- IncRnd 8y ago
  Spreadsheets used for calculating expenses were around long before computers.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  My non-technical grandparents use Excel for tracking expenses. Yeah, they couldn’t do complex formulas or macros, but that’s irrelevant. Using basic spreadsheet software is at least as ubiquitous as owning a home PC in the US. You can assume pretty much everyone can work their way through it, maybe with some help. Meanwhile, you could easily argue that filling in the same data in a web form via a browser would be less intuitive for many people. And regardless of which is easier, keeping the data private is clearly a priority.
  - kohanz 8y ago
    Yet despite all of those arguments, there are many budgeting or expense tracking "apps" (of the non-spreadsheet variety) out there that are popular, some of them massively. Analogy: with a little time and some equipment, practically anyone could learn to DIY their own oil changes, yet very few do.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      I doubt the existence of apps has much relationship to whether people are capable with a spreadsheet, and it also doesn’t control for whether a person who finds spreadsheets difficult would also find an app or a web form difficult. If someone is just trying to avoid tech generally, apps vs web forms vs spreadsheets aren’t going to matter, and to anyone else, decades of ubiquity of using spreadsheet software for badic things would favor spreadsheets. Heck, even a lot of high schools teach basic personal finance using Excel and have been since the 90s (my extremely poor rural public high school was doing this in 1995 for example). Also the top expense tracking app by number of users appears to be Mint (which claims somewhere near only 20MM users), which involves a great deal of data sharing and privacy questions. If we require a solution that keeps expense data private, it would shift a lot of favor to spreadsheets.
    - IncRnd 8y ago
      Your analogy only holds true if it is difficult to use a spreadsheet for adding and subtracting numbers. That's clearly false. Spreadsheets were the very first "killer apps" of computers for the precise reason that they are easy to use. So many people use spreadsheets today. What are the non-spreadsheet budgeting or expense tracking apps that are highly used?
mattsears 8y ago
Not everyone is handy with spreadsheets. I'm really good with spreadsheets and a piece of me dies inside with each new one I create.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Not everyone is handy with mobile app interfaces or web forms, or feeling comfortable understanding whether their data is private. It’s a bit of a convenient fiction to mentally picture people struggling to type something into a spreadsheet, while happily swiping and tapping through an app, but that’s not realistic. Spreadsheet workflows for personal budget, taxes, holiday shopping, etc., has been ubiquitous for a long time. It’s an interface people understand, regardless of being “a wizard” or not. It’s at best naive and at worst myopic to think that slapping a few things into an app or a web form actually constitutes something “easier” or “more intuitive” than something which has been a household staple of software for several decades.
  - hursey013 8y ago
    In the weeks since launching BudgetDuo, the percentage of users visiting the site from a mobile/tablet device outweighs those visiting from a desktop. Maybe folks find spreadsheets intuitive, but I'd disagree that trying to navigate and manipulate a spreadsheet on a phone is a better user experience than using a responsive web app designed with touch interfaces specifically in mind.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      But that could easily just be a selection bias effect. It’s marketed as a web app with a mobile interface, so it self-selects for people who already prefer that, and it would be a potential usage confounder, and would especially skew age demographics (as would questions about data privacy). Also it’s not clear if this is just general page views or account activity that actually engages the functionality. Pageviews generally wouldn’t matter because it would be swamped out by a prior heavily favoring the model that people prefer to browse the web on mobile devices, unrelated to what they prefer for other products or application interfaces. For example, I tend to browse job sites on either mobile or desktop indifferently. But I would absolutely only ever apply when browsing from a desktop, because application portals are too variable and require me to verify things and read more closely. Hypothetically, if someone looked at traffic data naively and saw it was “50/50” between desktop and mobile for some job portal, they might wrongly conclude they need to change the interface to support mobile differently, when really the difference is between cursory traffic that has no intention to apply (uses mobile device) vs. someone intending to apply and thus would not use a mobile device to do it no matter what changes were made to the job portal (uses desktop with strict desktop-only preference for anything involving e.g. resumes, cover letters, etc.). From a statistics point of view I suspect that baseline traffic numbers contain nearly zero information about customer preferences regarding app vs web form vs desktop spreadsheet when they finally sit down to actually enter the data and maintain it across time. The other thing is that I’d suspect weeks, or even months, worth of data would be far too little to draw any type of significant conclusion from for this type of usage question.
hursey013 8y ago
I've used a spreadsheet with the same basic functionality as this for years and it worked just fine. The main problem with it was when folks asked me to share it with them the spreadsheet wasn't exactly user friendly. Putting it in web app form makes it easier to identify which fields are meant to be edited and ensures that the formulas aren't accidentally changed. The web app can be used without an account just to experiment and plug some numbers in. My hope is that it can still be useful to folks that'd prefer not to save their data just to get some rough insights and perhaps be a starting point for developing their own custom spreadsheets.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I’ve never had a problem sharing spreadsheets with non-tech family members, college rommates, etc. In fact, I’d go as far to say that with non-tech family, an app or web form would be significantly harder to explain to them. They’ve been using spreadsheets for so long, even people who rarely use computers, that it’s highly intuitive, and things that try to “simplify” end up being actually more complicated.

kohanz 8y ago

You're thinking about this from the perspective of a developer, rather than the population at large. Suggest building a spreadsheet to one of your non-technical friends or family for something like this and you'll get a blank stare.

IncRnd 8y ago
Spreadsheets used for calculating expenses were around long before computers.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
My non-technical grandparents use Excel for tracking expenses. Yeah, they couldn’t do complex formulas or macros, but that’s irrelevant. Using basic spreadsheet software is at least as ubiquitous as owning a home PC in the US. You can assume pretty much everyone can work their way through it, maybe with some help. Meanwhile, you could easily argue that filling in the same data in a web form via a browser would be less intuitive for many people. And regardless of which is easier, keeping the data private is clearly a priority.
- kohanz 8y ago
  Yet despite all of those arguments, there are many budgeting or expense tracking "apps" (of the non-spreadsheet variety) out there that are popular, some of them massively. Analogy: with a little time and some equipment, practically anyone could learn to DIY their own oil changes, yet very few do.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I doubt the existence of apps has much relationship to whether people are capable with a spreadsheet, and it also doesn’t control for whether a person who finds spreadsheets difficult would also find an app or a web form difficult. If someone is just trying to avoid tech generally, apps vs web forms vs spreadsheets aren’t going to matter, and to anyone else, decades of ubiquity of using spreadsheet software for badic things would favor spreadsheets. Heck, even a lot of high schools teach basic personal finance using Excel and have been since the 90s (my extremely poor rural public high school was doing this in 1995 for example). Also the top expense tracking app by number of users appears to be Mint (which claims somewhere near only 20MM users), which involves a great deal of data sharing and privacy questions. If we require a solution that keeps expense data private, it would shift a lot of favor to spreadsheets.
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    Your analogy only holds true if it is difficult to use a spreadsheet for adding and subtracting numbers. That's clearly false. Spreadsheets were the very first "killer apps" of computers for the precise reason that they are easy to use. So many people use spreadsheets today. What are the non-spreadsheet budgeting or expense tracking apps that are highly used?

mattsears 8y ago

Not everyone is handy with spreadsheets. I'm really good with spreadsheets and a piece of me dies inside with each new one I create.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Not everyone is handy with mobile app interfaces or web forms, or feeling comfortable understanding whether their data is private. It’s a bit of a convenient fiction to mentally picture people struggling to type something into a spreadsheet, while happily swiping and tapping through an app, but that’s not realistic. Spreadsheet workflows for personal budget, taxes, holiday shopping, etc., has been ubiquitous for a long time. It’s an interface people understand, regardless of being “a wizard” or not. It’s at best naive and at worst myopic to think that slapping a few things into an app or a web form actually constitutes something “easier” or “more intuitive” than something which has been a household staple of software for several decades.
- hursey013 8y ago
  In the weeks since launching BudgetDuo, the percentage of users visiting the site from a mobile/tablet device outweighs those visiting from a desktop. Maybe folks find spreadsheets intuitive, but I'd disagree that trying to navigate and manipulate a spreadsheet on a phone is a better user experience than using a responsive web app designed with touch interfaces specifically in mind.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    But that could easily just be a selection bias effect. It’s marketed as a web app with a mobile interface, so it self-selects for people who already prefer that, and it would be a potential usage confounder, and would especially skew age demographics (as would questions about data privacy). Also it’s not clear if this is just general page views or account activity that actually engages the functionality. Pageviews generally wouldn’t matter because it would be swamped out by a prior heavily favoring the model that people prefer to browse the web on mobile devices, unrelated to what they prefer for other products or application interfaces. For example, I tend to browse job sites on either mobile or desktop indifferently. But I would absolutely only ever apply when browsing from a desktop, because application portals are too variable and require me to verify things and read more closely. Hypothetically, if someone looked at traffic data naively and saw it was “50/50” between desktop and mobile for some job portal, they might wrongly conclude they need to change the interface to support mobile differently, when really the difference is between cursory traffic that has no intention to apply (uses mobile device) vs. someone intending to apply and thus would not use a mobile device to do it no matter what changes were made to the job portal (uses desktop with strict desktop-only preference for anything involving e.g. resumes, cover letters, etc.). From a statistics point of view I suspect that baseline traffic numbers contain nearly zero information about customer preferences regarding app vs web form vs desktop spreadsheet when they finally sit down to actually enter the data and maintain it across time. The other thing is that I’d suspect weeks, or even months, worth of data would be far too little to draw any type of significant conclusion from for this type of usage question.

hursey013 8y ago

I've used a spreadsheet with the same basic functionality as this for years and it worked just fine. The main problem with it was when folks asked me to share it with them the spreadsheet wasn't exactly user friendly. Putting it in web app form makes it easier to identify which fields are meant to be edited and ensures that the formulas aren't accidentally changed. The web app can be used without an account just to experiment and plug some numbers in. My hope is that it can still be useful to folks that'd prefer not to save their data just to get some rough insights and perhaps be a starting point for developing their own custom spreadsheets.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I’ve never had a problem sharing spreadsheets with non-tech family members, college rommates, etc. In fact, I’d go as far to say that with non-tech family, an app or web form would be significantly harder to explain to them. They’ve been using spreadsheets for so long, even people who rarely use computers, that it’s highly intuitive, and things that try to “simplify” end up being actually more complicated.