Hi all,
I would like to open a dedicated thread to talk about how to display the
current balances (for each currency) and the transactions (currently
called history).
Thanks for starting this, Torsten.
There is a couple of things we might want to show the user:
* current balances
* past transactions
* pending transactions
* pending transactions that require user input
Could you give me some more details about what kind of input would be expected from users? Is the transaction "stuck" until users provide the required input?
All of those can be shown per currency or per exchange.
The fact that transactions can be displayed per currency and per exchange makes things even more complicated. I would keep things as simple as possible for now, and would stick to showing transactions per currency only. We can consider whether we need to show them per exchange later.
Basic question: Can exchanges provide more than one currency?
One idea is to show only the balances on the main screen with an icon
bringing the user to the transaction list.
I don't think we need an icon. Users know that items on a list are used for navigation: this is one of the most common design patterns in mobile apps. So when presented with a list of balances, they are likely to tap in one of them, if nothing else because that's what they are used to doing, and because there is not much else to do on the screen :)
However, we could do little things like, for users with only one currency, going straight to the transaction history for that currency when opening the app rather than showing the list of balances.
If there's pending
transactions, the icon could have a notification dot. If there's some
that require user input, they could be highlighted more prominently.
I think this is a very good use of iconography. If any of the transactions requires my attention, let me know in the balance list.
We could for example show a small summary of pending transactions below
the balance as well e.g. Balance: 5 EUR (+10 EUR incoming).
My concern with this is that things could get very complicated very quickly. What if I have a pending withdrawal and a pending payment (can a payment be pending?) or several pending withdrawals? I would be inclined to show the actual balance at all times (i.e. the balance that I can use to transact, which would be the current balance minus any pending payments and without pending withdrawals), and display any pending transactions at the top of the history list.
I should probably put a mockup together so that you can actually see what I mean: I'll try to do that.
Any thoughts?
Thanks and Kind Regards,
Torsten