The nature of bill splitting is time-consuming.

Three of our team members were roommates, often splitting numerous things without paying each other back immediately…sometimes up to two months. With Payback, we wanted to streamline the process for our users while keeping a fun, friendly vibe.

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My role

As a project manager, I created weekly agendas, led meetings, reviewed the team’s work, developed the roadmap, and assigned weekly tasks to ensure the team stayed on track.

As a UX designer, I designed the friends and cost distribution flow, created prototypes and micro-interactions for the entire design, and established our design system.

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With a smaller team and a short deadline, our scope was tight.

• Ten weeks to finalize MVP design 
• Ten weeks for development with only one developer
• Due to the extensive use of data visualizations, we aimed to ensure accessibility for those with color vision deficiency.

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Individuals with a spouse and children typically don't split bills.

Our initial user survey showed that most users would be college-aged individuals and single young adults. They are more likely to split bills due to income and/o tend to hang out with friends more frequently.

The older people get, the more likely they are to cover the tab or be busy with family.

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Our competitors were bloated with too many features and lacked collaboration.

Competitive and Task Flow Analysis Results:

• There is a need for group-based spending platforms.
• All apps had limitations, some paywalls, and a tedious user flow.
• Task flows were confusing with too many steps.
• Many had cluttered and outdated UI with unclear CTAs.

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We determined our MVP by identifying our core functionality.

Based on:

• Dev Feasibility
• Key User Needs
• Usability
• Competitors Features
• User Delight
• User Feedback from Surveys

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Ideating led to wireframes of our main task flow to test with users.

Our lead researcher developed concise qualitative and quantitative questions to ask and organized severity charts with design recommendations for every round of testing. 

Usability testing involved all team members conducting interviews.

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Our usability test results constantly helped simplify our user flow.

Key Takeaways from Mid-Fidelity:

• Not enough distinction between current friends and new friends
  • Solution: Separate the friends page or add more distinction through labels or sections
• No clear way to edit/delete friends
  • Solution: Add CTA, edit buttons, or wording to help the user
• Lock doesn't feel attached to the cost
  • Solution: Group the cost and lock together

Mid-Fidelity Average  Rating: 4.6 ★

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As we finalized designs, I built a design system for dev hand-off and for design consistency.

Creating a small design system was important to me. This ensured consistency throughout the project and allowed our dev to build out smaller components as we finalized screens.

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I learned many lessons as a project manager.

• Communication is key for hitting deadlines for deliverables.
• Keeping the roadmap and deadlines flexible is important for unforeseen circumstances.
• Include more research and validation at the start of the project to narrow MVP further and reduce workload.
• Despite being a team wearing multiple hats, I would have devs focus more on backend research code set-up during the design phase in the future.

(I applied all these lessons to my recent project, Daytrip!)

Takeaways from our users and process

• Payment integration is very important to our users, especially having multiple options.
• Unique icons like the lock are more difficult to understand at a glance; we would benefit from an onboarding flow.
• Organizing the importance of issues made sure important ones got resolved quickly.
• Friends flow is difficult to get right, and it's ok to reference other applications for it!

Final product

Our designs succeeded overall with our users; they found the process quick, simple, and easy to learn. If we had more time, we would have wanted to add features such as dark mode, notification design, gamification, and additional calculation methods. However, those were not within scope.

See Payback's high-fidelity prototype below!

Or view the coded prototype here.

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Promo video

I also illustrated and animated our promo video, as seen below. Please watch to see a quick showcase highlighting all of Payback's features!

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