Overview: This is a solo assignment with one goal: apply design principles to a simple app design.

First App Design: Expense Breakdown

Create a design for a mobile app that provides a straightforward way for people to calculate individual costs for shared expenses. You may be familiar with the Splitwise app. This assignment is asking you to ignore that and similar existing apps, and instead come up with your own spin on a much simpler version of the concept. Specifically, your app design must realize these basic user stories:

• "As any user of the expense breakdown app, I want to input the total cost of an expense so that I can easily calculate shared individual costs for a fixed (small) number of people."
• "As a math challenged user of the expense breakdown app, I want to customize application of tax, tip and percent shares per person so that I can rely on it in varying situations."
• "As an impatient user of the expense breakdown app, I want to save my most commonly used settings so that I can quickly get breakdowns for a new expense."

Part A: User Stories & Requirements [12 pts]

The first task is to create more user stories to inform your design, and also to extract relevant app requirements from all the user stories. Specifically:

• [6 pts] Write at least 2 user stories that may be added to the ones above to describe variations in the app's purpose and possible usage. We recommend talking to a variety of people about how and why they might want to use such an app. Remember that each story must be in the format: "As a <type of user> of the expense breakdown app, I want to <do something specific> so that I can <reach this goal or enjoy this benefit>."
• [6 pts] Turn the user stories (yours and the basic ones given above) into a set of requirements that include functional elements (what it does as a list of provided features) and design elements (how it does that including the desired look and feel). List these clearly, similar to our hi-lo app case study from class (day02).
• Type up your stories and requirements, and save in a pdf file named "a2stories_jhed.pdf", substituting your actual JHED login (name based) for "jhed" in the filename. Submit to assignment a2a on Canvas.

Part B: Create Design [15 pts]

Separate the features you've identified in Part A that are essential to realizing the provided user stories from more advanced app usages. Then create a app design for the fundamental usage only, paying particular attention to the design rules we discussed in class. For example, providing a full history of each expense and with who it was shared is not necessary for the the most basic app usage. This initial basic version of the app should contain three different activities (screen views) at the most - a minimally viable product. (We will be doing more complex app designs later in the course.)

• Minimally, you should provide views of your app through all the states the user will experience, similar to screen shots. Include annotations to indicate transitions between various states or app activities as a result of different user actions. Provide justifications for your design decisions and an explanation of any elements that are not obvious by inspection. Each view should show content, consistent data, and planned colors.
• The designs will be critiqued by your peers in class on Monday 2/9 (full participation expected) and graded by course staff using our Design Review Worksheet (in Canvas week02 module). Do not include any personal identifying information in your design document. Sketch your design either by hand (legibly! including colors) or with a drawing or other program. Powerpoint is a decent choice because you can put one view on each slide alongside notes, and easily duplicate to make consistent variations.
• Because this is your first design assignment, we are providing two examples as reference for you. The first design provides an example of the level of detail we'd like to see. The purpose of that app activity was to record the details for one driving lesson for a learner. The second example is a potential day02 classwork deliverable for a HiLo game design. This design reflects multiple views to illustrate different states as the app is being used, with arrows to indicate transitions from one view to the next. Your assignment submission is expected to be as detailed as the first example and as comprehensive as (or more than) the second example.
• Submit a pdf or jpg file containing your design and explanations to Canvas assignment a2b. Name your file for this part "a2design.pdf" and make sure you don't include any personally identifying information!

Submission Details

Both parts of your assignment must be submitted on Canvas before the deadline, to the appropriate assignment part. There will be a late grace period of 12 hours without penalty. In order for us to distribute your designs anonymously for critiquing, your actual design document (Part B) must be in an anonymous pdf document as specified above. Remember that we only grade your last submission.

Assistance Documentation: you must complete this brief survey to document what type of assistance you received from other people, AI agents, or internet sources (outside of the expected course resources) in completion of this graded work. Only one submission for both parts of a2 is required. Even if you do not have anything to acknowledge, you must complete the survey to indicate that. Note that JHED login is required to access the form. For all design assignments, you should also add documentation in the form of annotations within the design document itself for any help received outside of the expected course resources (materials/staff). This includes things like using AI assistants built into Figma or other drawing programs, asking agents/others to review and provide suggestions on improving your design, etc. You should briefly note the type of assistance and result of that aid.