Visual Finance for the iPad

The full board of the app displays the Balance Sheet and the Income Statement side by side. Comparisons and relationships are designed into the app's experience.

Introduction

Visual Finance is Four Clouds’ first consumer app for the iPad. Our client, Andromeda Training, Inc., is known worldwide for their business finance training programs. Income/Outcome is their flagship program, simulating the financial statements of businesses using real financial data. They have an internal tool that recreates that experience online, but wanted an app for the most popular current personal computing platform: the iPad.

Tapping a section on the board reveals a table of that company's relevant financial data. Selections update in real time, showing the meaning behind the design.

User Experience & Visual Design

Andromeda Training’s Income/Outcome has a rock solid mechanic based on nearly 20 years of business simulation game design and implementation. It makes the relationships inherent in a company’s financial statements clear, even to a novice user. Four Clouds was tasked with integrating this existing system with a contemporary design style and the user experience possibilities of the iPad.

Search the full list of available companies by name or by stock ticker symbol. Tapping a company name loads all it's available statements.

Since the iPad would present a completely new paradigm for the existing Income/Outcome system, Four Clouds started at first principles to redesign the simulation system’s user experience. The app brings the relationships between a company’s income statement and balance sheet closer to the forefront, with a unique aesthetic that combines classic pinball machine graphics with board game design. Andromeda Training also wanted some interactive features that would allow users to share their findings with whomever they want over email. In order to accomplish all of these goals, the app needed a strong technological foundation to complement and undergird its strong design.

See three primary financial ratios overlaid on the regions used to calculate them with all of the real data shown. Each relationship appears distinct and easy to read.

Development & Implementation

The problems solved by Four Clouds weren’t just limited to visual design. The free version of the app would be filled with only 12 companies’ financial data, including Apple, Inc. However, after an in-app purchase, a user has access to over 450 companies, including most of the Fortune 500®.

With all of this data, the backend of the app needs to be robust and responsive, while not interfering with the user experience of the app. The financial data used to populate each company’s board is drawn from one of Mergent’s APIs. Four Clouds built a web app for processing and organizing this data, preparing it for retrieval from within the iPad app. The flow of data is optimized so that the user’s experience with the app over time won’t be hindered by downloads of new and updated content.

The glossary mode displays fine detail for each section of the app. The current section title, its current value, and a succint definition of the selected term appear.

Conclusion

When everything is brought together, the solid backend and the usable, attractive front end create an app that presents business finance in a completely new way. Visual Finance makes the complicated world of business finance and its accompanying statements accessible to everyone, while having the heft of real data behind it to please even the most detail-oriented financial professional.

The built-in share button attaches a screenshot of the current view and HTML tables of the Balance Sheet and the Income Statement to a new email inside the app.