10. Solution Audit
Analyze existing designs to gain insights and guide product improvements.
Summary
A key problem statement identified from previous lessons about Money Lover, a digital expense tracking app: "The process of entering expenses in Money Lover doesn’t align with how users naturally recall their spending (Memory recall)"
In today’s lesson, I’ll recap how Anh Chung guided our class through exploring various expense tracking methods, both digital and non-digital, to uncover valuable insights and lessons we can take (or avoid) from these solutions.
Solution Audit
What is Solution Audit?
Solution audit: evaluates the effectiveness of a specific solution, product, or feature. It involves assessing how well the solution meets user needs, its performance, and its overall impact.
💡 The goal is to improve the current solution
Solution audit and Competitive audit
Competitive Audit: Focuses on analyzing competitors’ products or services. This involves examining the strengths, weaknesses, features, and user experiences of competitor offerings to identify opportunities and gaps in the market.
💡 In short, a solution audit is about evaluating your own product, while a competitive audit looks at competing products in the market.
How to conduct vs. in-depth solution audit
Define the purpose
Defining clear objectives sets the project’s scope, eliminating scope creep and keeping the focus on your intended goals.
Choose direct and indirect solutions
When you make a list of your solutions to research and analyze, you need direct and indirect solutions:
Direct solutions offer the same value to potential customers as you do
Indirect solutions offer a similar proposition to different customers
It’s best to pick 2–3 direct and 1–2 indirect solutions for your audit.
Analyze and identify the pros and cons of each solutions
Concentrate on the specific purpose and evaluate the pros and cons of both direct and indirect solutions. Avoid analyzing the entire product, as it may not be relevant.
Extract insights to enhance and refine existing products
Summarize the pros and cons of the evaluated solutions, highlighting key aspects to enhance and pitfalls to avoid. Use these insights to establish a clear target goal for our solution, incorporating the analyzed factors
Write a report and action points to share
Compile your findings into a concise report that directly aligns with the initial goals set at the start of the project.
An Example
Solution Audit Example
From pervious lesson we learnt, anh Chung gave us a problem statement from Money Lover, a digital expense tracking app:
💵 "The process of entering expenses in Money Lover doesn’t align with how users naturally recall their spending (Memory recall)"
When doing a solution audit for Money Lover, we came up with a few solutions to track expense:
Taking note on paper
Taking note on digital note app or messaging platform
Tracking on excel template
Other expense record app
Expense categorization feature in digital banking platforms
Automated expense categorization feature based on product receipts
Pipu expense tracking bot
etc.
Taking expense note on paper
Taking notes on paper aligns seamlessly with how users naturally recall their spending: they write down what they remember.
Pros: Strong alignment with memory recall.
Cons: Challenging to synthesize and calculate totals.
Taking expense note on digital note app or messaging platform
This is similar to taking note on paper but digitally.
Pros: Strong alignment with memory recall.
Cons: Challenging to synthesize and calculate totals.
Tracking expense on excel template
While the previous two methods align seamlessly with users' natural spending recall, tracking expenses in Excel presents a different challenge: our memory doesn’t easily translate to cells, columns, and rows. Users must summarize their expenses within this structured format.
Pros:
Customizable categorization of expenses.
It's relatively easy to remember entries, though not as intuitive as paper notes.
Cons:
Requires significant time and effort to organize files, including calculation formulas and categories.
Other expense record app
They function similarly to Money Lover, requiring users to navigate through numerous unnecessary steps to record their expenses, as they all replicate each other's product flows.
Pros: No valuable insights can be gained to enhance product features.
Cons: None
Expense categorization feature in digital banking platforms
Users don’t even need to manually input amounts to record their expenses; this feature automatically syncs and utilizes data from payment and transfer history, requiring users only to select the appropriate categories.
This functionality proactively addresses potential issues before they arise.
Pros:
Sync and leverage data from payment and transfer history to automatically record expenses, removing the need for manual reminders.
Automatically categorize expenses to simplify management, allowing users to focus on their finances without overthinking. This approach provides valuable insights that can be derived from solutions like Timo and Vietcombank.
Cons: None
Automated expense categorization feature based on product receipts
This feature takes a step further by automatically labeling user spending based on their transaction records. Most user expenses can be categorized using this transaction data.
Pros:
Syncs and utilizes data from payment and transfer history to automatically record expenses, eliminating the need for manual reminders.
Automatically categorizes expenses, simplifying management and allowing users to focus on their finances without unnecessary mental effort.
Cons: None
Pipu expense tracking bot
This approach operates similarly to taking notes in a digital note-taking or messaging platform, utilizing a slash ("/") command. While it aids memory recall, the need to type commands and format entries can add extra steps.
Pros: Supports memory recall.
Cons: Requires formatting through slash ("/") commands.
What can we learn after all these Solutions Audit
💡 Our solution should be fully automated to eliminate any need for user effort. If manual input is required, it should be as simple as writing on paper, while also offering the ability to organize and synthesize data as efficiently as Excel.
