Where paying bills is a team play.
Anyone between 20-40 years old, who’s financially active/ aware and somewhat tech-oriented who goes out with more than one person or in a group at least once every week have one thing in common: the stress about splitting the bill. People usually stress or take a long period of time splitting the bill when receiving it after; eating out, going to parties, using a driver service, planning expenses ahead of time or any activity that you could think of that requires a payment when out with more than one person.
Currently users have to track their bills by writing them down, one by one, or memorising them in their heads, sometimes even leading to paying incorrectly. By efficiently dividing the information received from the bill, as well as the amount and number of recipients, we can give users the time and messy moments of calculating and knowing who needs to pay what and when back, making this uncomfortable situation, a problem of the past.
All users we interviewed had this problem in common, they never thought ahead when going out, how they would’ve needed to divide their bill (unless of course they were just inviting and paying for all) and the moment they received it repeatedly represented; time wasted, stress, as well as unconformity.
In the situation of planning an event ahead of time, less mistakes were made, however it still took some time to calculate the expenses within the group. Even when doing so it was also hard to input or share the ‘expense chart’ with the rest of the group. In the case of adding expenses, or modifying something, was also too complicated unless a recipient in charge did all the work for the rest of the group, leading to miscalculations or inaccuracy.
We were able to do over 10 interviews which went over the following questions:
Our proposed solution is to build a free mobile-first web app that provides an easy to use bill splitting experience, which simplifies what the user needs to pay and to whom they need to pay after receiving one or multiple bills.
Based on user pain points collected from our initial research, we prioritised the features we want to deliver based on the following parameters:
Must-haves
Good-to-have
Future backlog
Chaski | 25 | Grad Student at NYU
Pre-testing Questions
1. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1=not at all confident, 5=very confident), how would you rate your level of confidence in using your mobile phone for splitting your bill? 2
2. How often do you use your phone to track, split, or revise your bill? Not often, I’ve never used an app
3. Which of the following indicates how much you know about splitting your bill with a technological tool?
Flow 1: Adding a Friend
Insights
Pain Points
Opportunities
Flow 2: Creating an Activity + Split Bill Evenly
Insights
Pain Points
Opportunities
Flow 3: Splitting Bills Individually
Insights
Pain Points
Opportunities
Sam | 27 | Developer at Disney
Pre-testing Questions
1. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1=not at all confident, 5=very confident), how would you rate your level of confidence in using your mobile phone for splitting your bill? 4
2. How often do you use your phone to track, split, or revise your bill? Often like a few times per month
3. Which of the following indicates how much you know about splitting your bill with a technological tool?
Flow 1: Adding a Friend
Insights
Pain Points
Opportunities
Flow 2: Creating an Activity + Split Bill Evenly
Insights
Pain Points
Opportunities
Flow 3: Splitting Bills Individually
Insights
Pain Points
Opportunities
Technical implementation
Technical challenges
At the moment we won’t be pursuing this project in the future, although we might change our minds.
I had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with a cross-functional team of software engineers and designers thanks to COLAB. We gathered user feedback at each stage of the process to iterate on our product, prioritized and de-scoped items as necessary. In many respects, it was modelled after the product pod of a genuine firm.
I learned:
We had certain difficulties mainly due to our own time restraints, as well as trying to have more differentiating functionalities ready for the MVP.
However, we talked by communicating at least once through the various channels we used and summarising the functionalities to the most important ones for the MVP.