Money Map
For the Improvement of understanding of student finances
Made by Teddy Lee
My problem in daily life was that I have to manage much of my own funds for food, entertainment, and other expenses, but the interfaces the banks and other financial institutions had was unintuitive and unrepresentative and hid the larger picture behind many numbers. My idea is to create a graph similar to the google+ waves map that showed your accounts, your income, your spending, and other financial information in the macro, through circles proportionally big as the account, the micro, through information appearing when you hover over or click on a circle, and have a temporal aspect through a timeline which would position the expenses of the week selected as circles coming off of whatever account they came from. This would allow you, at a glance, to figure out how much money you have, where its going, how your spending changed from week to week, and where you could stand to save a little more. This data could come from sources like mint.com which track all your accounts at once. This is particularly important for college students as they are just now entering a period of new found financial independence and it would encourage accessibility to their financial information in order to have them make more informed decisions.
Created: September 15th, 2014
My problem in daily life was that I have to manage much of my own funds for food, entertainment, and other expenses, but the interfaces the banks and other financial institutions had was unintuitive and unrepresentative and hid the larger picture behind many numbers. My idea is to create a graph similar to the google+ waves map that showed your accounts, your income, your spending, and other financial information in the macro, through circles proportionally big as the account, the micro, through information appearing when you hover over or click on a circle, and have a temporal aspect through a timeline which would position the expenses of the week selected as circles coming off of whatever account they came from. This would allow you, at a glance, to figure out how much money you have, where its going, how your spending changed from week to week, and where you could stand to save a little more. This data could come from sources like mint.com which track all your accounts at once. This is particularly important for college students as they are just now entering a period of new found financial independence and it would encourage accessibility to their financial information in order to have them make more informed decisions.
I think this kind of graph would be very useful to visualize expenses and track your personal flow of money. I wonder if, over time, this graph could also get too cluttered with information to be useful. Maybe it would help if you could set it to only show like the last year, or the last month of cash flows.
If you look at the example, it is a bit faint, I intended it to show only the expenses from the last week and you could switch between and progress through weeks and it would only show the transactions from the last week.
This is certainly a pragmatic solution to a real world problem, but how might you use a representation of money / budgets to give someone a revalatory rather than a reflective experience of their wallet/bank balance? The approach demonstrates a perspective on graphic / data excellent - but how might you move this into an aesthetic realm and encourage people to reconsider or confront their relationship with money and spending?
For example, people often perform mental accounting - an great example is Dustin Hoffman http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate-uk/2014/04/15/mental-accounting-the-jar-fallacy/ - how might you challenge the way in which people typically organize themselves around their money on a monthly basis rather than conform with conventional modes of planning?
As a follow on point, the representation of your idea needs some attention - the abstract is used for the body of the text. It's not easy to read - move some of this content inline so that a viewer can more easily digest the concept. Some illustrative graphics before you hit your sketch might also be useful too.
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