[mlthoughts2018]

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]

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]

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.

[mattsears]

BudgetDuo is a joy to use and that's the key. Sure, you can make Facebook clone on google sheets, but no one will use it. It's not convenient fiction at all, it's much much easier to swipe and tap on a mobile app than to do work on a spreadsheet - who want's to do that?

[mlthoughts2018]

Huh? After visiting the BudgetDuo site, I’d definitely say that a traditional spreadsheet is easier and more organized.

Even more important is that I know my data would remain private and I would not have to trust a third party like BudgetDuo to be a safe steward of any of the data about shared expenses.

[mattsears]

Huh? You're in the minority here if you're saying that people would rather use a spreadsheet than web/mobile app. How can more than one person see or update their shared expenses if the Excel spreadsheet resides on your partner's computer? That doesn't sound easy to me.