Navigation in Aimiya: fast and easy‎

 Applications for mobile devices have some differences compared to applications for PC.  One fundamental difference – is the user interface. Usually, mobile devices have small display, there is no mouse or pointer device and their resources (memory, processor) are very limited. If the device has a touch screen, you need to consider the following factors, size of the finger or pointer, which can hide the biggest part of the screen while pressing items on the screen. You need to remember as well, that majority of people would like to use only one hand in order to manage the device, keeping the device and the management of the application in the fingers of the same hand.

Usually, working with a mobile application represents movements between screens, while working with desktop or laptop PC the user is allowed to operate with number of screens. If the mobile application has a deep internal structure and logic, the number of screens could be 20 or even more. Cell phones are not very suited for navigation using menus: they have small buttons with tight press, small screens with small type and usage while you are walking or traveling is never convenient and can be dangerous.

During development of the Aimiya Financial Goal application, we used special utilities in order to make navigation very convenient and comfortable for end users. First of all we use hardware buttons of the cell phone. We utilize all four main buttons UP, DOWN, LEFT and RIGHT. Buttons LEFT and RIGHT usually correspondent with the BACK and SELECT (FIRE) actions. From any menu screen you can reach help menu by pressing the 0 button.

 

If device has censored screen or sticker, under menu you can chouse another action, usually Save (Bank) and Exit

 

This line is specially created in the way, so that selecting this command your finger or pointer, you will not hide the screen.

The Back action, is usually selected very often, therefore Aimiay Financial Goal offers additional possibilities to choose such action. In order to come back to previous screen you can press Headings of menu or free space, which will be available under menu list, IF this list has not covered the full screen.

The main layout of menu in Aimiya Financial Goal is adapted for mobile devices as well.

 

The active line of the menu is specific: if the command SELECT is available the highlight from the right side is finished with a semicircle; if command BACK is available the highlight from the left site is finishing with a semicircle. Therefore user can always understand which command now available without looking to the system menu underneath. Unfortunately, this feature may be too difficult to observe on the devices with small displays.

The Aimiay Financial Goal screen, has a number of columns with text, dates and numbers. Devices with small display have no room to show all this data. There is no sense to organize horizontal scrolling of screen, like for PC therefore some data could be missing. To resolve this issue, we automatically hide some columns. Every column has own weight depending on the importance of its information. The column with a low weight will be hiden first. If after this, the remaining column can still not be presented in a proper way the column with the next less importance will be hidden and so on. On the screenshot we show as examples how it is works with increase of the font size, the program automatically hides Estimates and Balances columns.

 

Viewing diagrams and charts has some issues for mobile devices as well. In order to reflect Dates and Numbers you can use “1” button, in order to show grid scale – button “2”, and button “3” for current date.

 

You can use buttons UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT buttons to manage the scale and the button “*” to return to a previous screen.

When you decide to view the pie chart, the sections could be selected by LEFT and RIGHT keys or with the buttons under the diagrams. Allocation of this buttons was specially chosen in order to avoid hide the screen during operation.

 

Amerco International and their developers are constantly improving the Aimiya Financial Goal application and we hope you will enjoy working with our product.