Sprint 1 report - Moviles-G45/FlutterApp GitHub Wiki

📝 Sprint 1 Report

1. 🔍 Problem and Solution Overview

🛠️ Selected Problem

Many young adults and university students, struggle with managing their finances due to a lack of financial education and limited experience with independent money management. This often leads to poor budgeting, overspending, and difficulty saving for both short-term and long-term goals. Without tools to help track expenses and control spending, they face financial instability and increased anxiety, ultimately impacting their ability to meet essential and personal aspirations, such as traveling or building emergency savings.

💡 Proposed Solution

The solution is a user-friendly finance app designed to support young adults in developing responsible financial habits. The app includes automated expense tracking through bank integration, personalized notifications to prevent overspending, and customizable savings goals. It also offers simple budget creation tools and gamified challenges to engage users and help them stay motivated. By providing real-time insights and alerts, the app empowers users to take control of their finances, reduce stress, and achieve both essential and personal financial goals.

2. 🧩 Problem Description with PAS Structure

List and describe PAS according to the group size requirements. PAS Gabriela PAS Julian PAS Miguel PAS Juan Obando

3. 🖼️ Context Canvas

4. 👥 Personas

Analytics personas:

Prospective personas: Diagrama sin título drawio persona

5. 🧠 Empathy Maps

Empathy map 1
Empathy map 2

Empathy map 3

Empathy map 4

6. ❓ Business Questions

Type	Question
1	What are the main challenges students face when managing their money independently?
1	How long does it take to open the application?
2	What is the goal that most users seek when using the app?
2	Has the user forgotten to log expenses for multiple days?
2	⁠Has the user consistently used the app to track expenses for the last two weeks?
2	What features do students find most useful in a financial manegement app?
2	How do users engage with different features, and which functionalities drive the most consistent usage?
3	What new tools can make it faster and easier for students to track their daily expenses?
3	What app features can encourage to save money more effectively
3	What system performance or usability issues contribute to users abandoning financial management apps?
4	What are the common financial spending patterns in the youth?
4	How does seasonal spending behavior vary among students?
5	What percentage of reported bugs directly affect core business functionality?
5	How does app performance impact user retention over time?

7. 🗺️ VD Map

https://app.diagrams.net/#G1OQpdH3lURnvJaGN8ghfOOdnYUCLAqiUw#%7B%22pageId%22%3A%22Co5nbBrR2NN09ta7Q-Ko%22%7D

VD map drawio

8. ⚙️ Functional Scenarios

9. ✅ Quality Scenarios

QS miguel

10. 📢 Design Justifications

📊 Context: Questions + VD Map

The proposed questions aim to uncover key insights into user behavior, financial challenges, and technical usability to refine the app’s design. The Visualization-Data (VD) Map was used as a validation tool to ensure that each question is supported by relevant data, enabling data-driven decision-making.

1. User Behavior & Financial Challenges
Understanding how users manage their money is crucial for designing financial tools that address their needs.

What are the main challenges students face when managing their money independently?
What are the common financial spending patterns among young users?
How does seasonal spending behavior vary among students?

Why These Questions Matter
These questions help identify key financial struggles such as impulse spending, difficulty budgeting, and saving challenges. Studies, including user interviews and surveys, show that financial literacy gaps are a major barrier. Addressing these issues requires intuitive budgeting tools, automated expense tracking, and personalized financial insights.

2. User Interaction & App Engagement
Assessing how users interact with the app helps identify drop-off points and areas for improvement.

What is the primary goal users seek when using the app?
Has the user forgotten to log expenses for multiple days?
Has the user consistently tracked expenses over the last two weeks?

Why These Questions Matter
If users frequently forget to log expenses, implementing push notifications, gamification, or AI-driven auto-tracking can enhance engagement. The VD Map links user behavior to app features, helping optimize UX for better retention.

3. Feature Prioritization & Usability
Determining which features users value the most ensures efficient development and higher adoption rates.

What features do students find most useful in a financial management app?
What new tools can make expense tracking faster and easier?
What app features can encourage better saving habits?

Why These Questions Matter
Validating feature usefulness helps prioritize development. Insights from user surveys, in-app behavior tracking, and A/B testing help identify which tools (e.g., automatic categorization, spending insights, or savings goals) provide the highest value.

4. Technical Performance & User Retention
Ensuring a fast, stable, and smooth experience is key to retaining users.

How long does it take to open the application?
What features should be improved to prevent crashes and service interruptions?
What system performance issues lead to app abandonment?

Why These Questions Matter
Performance issues like slow loading times or data synchronization failures negatively impact user retention. Insights from error reports, app analytics, and user feedback help identify performance bottlenecks.

5. Business Impact & App Stability
Understanding the relationship between app performance and user retention is critical for long-term success.

What percentage of reported bugs directly affect core business functionality?
How does app performance influence long-term user retention?

Why These Questions Matter
A high percentage of critical bugs (e.g., transaction failures, incorrect balance calculations) erodes user trust. The VD Map helps quantify how technical issues contribute to user churn, providing a roadmap for continuous improvement.

By structuring questions around user needs, technical performance, and business goals, the VD Map ensures that data-driven insights guide product decisions. This approach aligns user experience, financial education, and app stability with long-term growth and retention strategies.

👤 Personas, Empathy Maps, PAS, Context Canvas:

Persona Development
The persona development was based on common financial behaviors and pain points observed in this demographic, such as impulsive spending, lack of budgeting habits, and difficulty in tracking expenses, evidenced in our interviews.
Empathy Maps
To further empathize with the target users, we shaped our empathy maps to help us understand their thoughts, frustrations, and motivations, reinforcing the need for a simple yet effective financial management tool that provides automation, real-time notifications, and personalized insights.
PAS (Pain Points, Alternatives, Solutions)
We reflected the key features by identifying pain points like overspending, missed bill payments, and lack of savings motivation, addressing them with features such as spending alerts, budgeting tools, and gamified savings challenges.
Context Canvas
The context canvas provided a comprehensive framework for structuring the interactions between users, external systems, and backend services, ensuring the finance app is scalable, secure, and highly available. By mapping out these elements, we identified two core user personas, whose pain points such as difficulty tracking expenses, overspending, and lack of engagement with traditional budgeting tools, guided the app’s top features. The first one was an automated spending tracker with real-time categorization; the second one focused on integrated gamified challenges and rewards to promote consistent budgeting habits. In defining the app's interactions, we examined existing financial solutions like Monefy, Fintonic, and Mint but differentiated our app by offering a more engaging and personalized experience. While many budgeting apps focus only on tracking expenses, ours integrates interactive challenges, real-time spending insights, and tailored financial recommendations, reducing decision fatigue and making financial management less intimidating. The app stores transaction data until synced and cached reports for offline access, ensuring usability in low-connectivity environments. To ensure seamless integration and efficiency, the backend services were structured with three core components: a notification system (Firebase Cloud Messaging) for spending alerts and bill reminders, a database (Firebase) to store transactions and user profiles, and a charting API (Google Charts) to generate visual financial insights. These services enhance real-time responsiveness, allowing users to receive instant feedback on their spending habits and interact dynamically with their budgets. Key constraints were identified to maintain a balance between scalability, performance, and usability. The system must support thousands of users without lag, handle latency for real-time data processing, and ensure secure transactions given the sensitivity of financial information. Additionally, bank API reliability was recognized as a crucial factor, as some financial institutions may not support open banking, which could limit automatic expense tracking. To maintain user engagement, gamification was carefully designed to be rewarding without feeling overwhelming or restrictive. Finally, we target every component of the app, from user interactions to backend architecture, was aligned with our goal of providing an intuitive, engaging, and reliable financial management tool. By anticipating real-world constraints and ensuring scalability and security, we created a robust solution tailored to the needs of young adults learning to manage their finances independently.

🛡️ Quality and functional scenarios

Quality scenarios
Ensuring a seamless and reliable user experience in a financial application requires careful attention to key quality attributes like resilience, performance, scalability, usability, and availability. These attributes contribute to a system that is efficient, secure, and user-friendly, even in challenging conditions. Resilience plays a crucial role in maintaining data integrity, as seen in the scenario where the user loses internet connection while saving an expense. Instead of proceeding with an unstable connection and risking data loss, the app detects the issue, notifies the user, and waits until connectivity is restored. Similarly, resilience is vital in handling low-memory situations, where the app ensures smooth operation by prioritizing essential functions, automatically saving progress, and advising users to close other apps to maintain performance. Performance and usability are essential in time-sensitive scenarios, such as when a user quickly checks their budget summary between tasks. The app guarantees that financial data loads within five seconds, ensuring that users can access crucial information without delay. This same focus on performance is evident in high server load situations, where scalability and availability become critical. During peak times, such as payday, a surge in user traffic could slow down the system. To prevent disruptions, the app distributes requests efficiently through load balancing and prioritizes core functions like balance updates, ensuring that users experience minimal delays.
Functional scenarios

Ensuring a high quality user experience requires various quality attributes, such as resilience, usability, performance, and scalability. The functional scenarios illustrate how different users interact with the app, and each scenario aligns with quality attributes to maintain reliability and efficiency under different conditions. One critical aspect is resilience, as demonstrated in scenarios where users face connectivity issues or low memory availability. For instance, Valentina, who shops online, benefits from real time notifications, ensuring that transactions are successfully registered even with temporary disconnections. Similarly, if a user like Juan loses internet connection while planning his savings, the system must pause the process and resume it once connectivity is restored. This guarantees data integrity and prevents financial miscalculations. Additionally, the app prioritizes critical features when a device experiences memory constraints, ensuring smooth operation without unnecessary disruptions. Usability and performance play a significant role in providing a seamless experience for users of varying financial knowledge. David, a young professional structuring his first budget, benefits from the intuitive allocation system that distributes his salary into predefined categories. Likewise, Sara, a retail worker, efficiently tracks her daily spending, receiving instant insights on her budget limits. These scenarios emphasize the necessity of quick data retrieval and real-time feedback, which the app ensures by optimizing response times and processing transactions promptly. The quick budget overview feature, exemplified by Juan’s scenario, allows users to access financial summaries in less than five seconds, catering to users with limited time. Scalability and availability are essential for handling high traffic, particularly during peak times such as salary days. Daniel’s case, where he links his bank account for automatic expense tracking, highlights the need for real-time synchronization and load balancing. The app must process a high volume of banking transactions efficiently, avoiding delays while sending timely notifications when a budget limit is reached. Additionally, Sofia’s scenario where she tracks expenses and visualizes trends demonstrates the necessity of a well-structured system that can accommodate numerous transactions without performance degradation.