Buddy Budget

The good bits:

  • New users are not required to sign up. They can choose to “Get started,” which guides them through the lightweight task of adding one expense. Since creating a budget can be a daunting task, this breaks it down into manageable parts for new users.
  • After entering the single expense, the new user is delivered into the main app experience and is given many next steps in the form of default states and inline guidance.
  • There is a lot of scaffolding in place to guide users through several of the app’s key actions. For example, if the user taps on the trigger to set up reminders via one of the inline tips on the home screen, the app guides them through enabling notifications and setting time details to the reminders.
  • The app uses a free sample approach. It does not require users to subscribe to their service, nor notify them with endless pop-up prompts, but instead prompts the user reactively when they try to enable key features.

To be improved:

  • Sometimes, the inline tips on the home screen don’t disappear even after the    user has completed a task. For example, I set up reminders, but the tip to set up reminders remained on the home screen when I returned to it.
  • It doesn’t seem possible to get back tips if you choose to hide them all. In Buddy Budget, this is OK because many other points of the app still provide entry points to those key actions, but this could be problematic for users that didn’t realize they couldn’t get them back.