I like Stephen's acknowledgement of two issues, but I don't want them to be all that distinct. Hstory is history. People want to review the whole system and understand the interactions. Most of the time, people will be wanting to generally review what happened why and how the system works. They will not be doing accounting.
> "Where did my precious real money actually go?" I think that is the wrong question most of the time. The vast majority of patrons will actually never feel that $5 was precious at all. I think Robert is imagining a very particular sort of sensitive user who is in the minority. Here's one anecdata point: Of people we've gotten around to sending stickers to for their donations, many have basically said "oh yeah! I forgot whether I'd donated or not, although I remember seeing the campaign. Well, great, thanks for the sticker and good luck!" We're talking very small amounts of money, and once we include a budget limit, it's possibly that nearly every patron will have no interest in careful accounting. If they see that every charge on their account is a range from zero to their budget limit with either zero charges or one charge per month, they will be satisfied. End of story. I think they will almost never have any interest in just knowing precisely about the charge details without the context of thinking about other patrons and crowdmatching and the overall Snowdrift.coop system. I'm suggesting it's possible or likely that the vast majority of the time anyone is interested in history, it's because they want to understand the crowdmatching system, their place in it, etc. They review history as a way to reinforce their understanding of the system. They basically never think "my precious money, what happened to it?". They are thinking "so, I was charged X. How does that relate to how the projects are doing and what other patrons are putting in?" So, I think overall that I agree with Michael's points in this conversation. His approach is much more aligned with helping people understand what the mechanism is doing. Charges are included in that understanding, as they should be. The factor that's missing in the history and may be the very most important is showing the total the projects got. The main thing a history viewer wants to see is "I put in X, but that's part of all these patrons, so crowdmatching got my chosen projects Y total funds! Yay!" And to be able to review what is happening with the crowdmatching over time. Because carry-over charges are related to any particular patron's combined pledges and budget limit, it's not appropriate to show the total crowdmatching for projects only around charges, it needs to be focused on when the donation level was set, regardless of when the funds actually get charged. For budgeting and auditing purposes, it's easy enough to just show a charge history and to itemize what that charge covers (including what of it is a fee and what is carry-over). That view should exist. But to presume that it is the view of most important interest to most people is, I predict, not going to be a supported hypothesis in the end.
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.snowdrift.coop https://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/design
