BUDGETR: A Behavioral Study and Web-App
Budgetr is a web-app and behavioral study I had to conduct and build for my Intermediate Design Studio course. This was a week long study, where I asked five participants to log their spending. This web-app was inspired by the increasing amount of debt being held by college students, and the increasing amount of spending as a whole. On average a typical college student spends 5,000 dollars a year on food. The intentions of my budget/spending web application were to asses the spending habits of five individuals and and understand their spending habits compared to the typical college student.
I sought to explore how much the average student spends in a week, what they spend their money on, and whether or not they use cash, credit, or debit. I also sought to gather insight before I conducted the study on what they thought the average amount they spent was, and if they owned a credit card and paid on it monthly.
This is a view of each page in the web-app
At the beginning of the study, and development of my web-app, my goal was to find out about mow much the average student spent. I have always been passionate about keeping a budget and developing good spending habits, and I wanted to see if other students were doing the same. I did some research before the development and discovered that an average student in college holds around 2,000 to 5,000 dollars in credit card debt and spends an average of 5,000 dollars on food a year, that number doesn't include bills or other spendings.
I asked five students to participate in my study, who are from a variety of backgrounds, majors, and spending preferences. I had them log each time they spent money, and tracked how much they spent, what they spent it on, and what they used to spend money. They could choose from spending money on clothes, food, transportation, or other, and had credit, debit, and cash as choices for what they used.
Prior to conducting the study, I did research and created a mock-up of the web-app and state diagrams to help prototype my idea, and assist in bringing it to life.
This is a view of each page in my mock-up using Figma
This is a view of my state diagrams outlining the flow of the app
Creating a mock-up and state diagrams of how my app would flow and look helped assist me in writing MySQL, PHP, and HTML. It gave me a better idea of how everything would run, connect, and look.
If I were to continue this study, and continue to build off of my web-app I would work to make it look more like the mock-up and I would also take a longer time studying the participants. I would gather data like the yearly income, current credit card debt, bills they have to pay, and the amount of student loans they have if any. I would also track monthly payments and subscriptions to get a bigger idea of where their money was going. I thought about potentially creating something like this in the future to help college students navigate finances, and this class has allowed me to gain skills in the basics of building a web-app and testing users.
My results related to some of the information I found in the research I did prior to the study. I looked at the averages each participant spent throughout the week, and I also looked at how much they spent in total, how many times they spent money, and what was the most common spend category (food, clothes, transportation, other), and the most common spend type (credit, debit, cash) amongst all of the participants.
Per my results, food was the most common category of spending, and a debit card was used the most, but there were still some spendings using credit cards. In the future I want to look into what other spendings the students had, and what their current credit card state looked liked.
But my findings seem to correlate with the research done before hand on the average student. Even though each student had varying spendings throughout the week, the most common type was food.
Each participant was notified and consented regarding their information being put into this behance, and the participant used in the images for the appearance of the app consented to their spending statistics being published.
