Overview
Designing a user-friendly app that makes splitting bills easier for everyone
My Role
Product design
Type
Personal project
Timeline
5 days
Problem statement
How can you create a solution to split a check at a restaurant between drinkers and nondrinkers and vegetarians and non vegetarians?
5 friends go for dinner. 3 are vegetarians, 2 are non-vegetarians, 3 of them drink. Out of these 3 who drink, 2 of them are vegetarians. How to split a bill for veg, non-veg and drinks?
The Goal
The goal of the solution is to create an easy and feasible way to split a bill at restaurants between drinkers/non-drinkers and vegetarians/non-vegetarians so that
It is fair and equal
It can avoid awkwardness in a large group
Everyone gets to pay the exact amount
Defining the Audiance
Any adults around the world who want to split any shared bill with others could use our solution. Considering the scenario where the user would have to split the bill with others in a restaurant for sharing food, here are the specific audiences that our product would appeal to:
Colleagues and co-workers: Professionals who frequently go out for business lunches or dinners with colleagues and want a streamlined solution for splitting bills based on their preferences.
Friends/roommates: These can be school/college/work friends who go out to have food together more often and want a convenient way of splitting bills
Couples: Couples or individuals on date nights who want a fair way to split the bill based on their own food and beverage choices.
Restaurant Owners and Managers: they might want to see the value in offering a digital solution that enhances the dining experience for their customers and streamlines the payment process.
Context and needs
Now let’s see under what conditions our platform will be used.
When the user is with his friends
Receives the bill
Wants to divide the bill among all fairly
The motivation for users to use the app would be to split bills in a way that aligns with their preferences, ensuring fairness and customization based on their food choices, beverage preferences, and individual orders. So, from a product perspective,
our work is to make sure that our platform provides a seamless customer experience for fulfilling this need.
User Research and Pain Points
To get some more clarity on the context defined in the previous step, I conducted user research to understand what are the main problems, and why they happen. How is the user solving it currently and is the current solution helping them?
Here are the results based on 25 responses received
79.3% of the people said casual outings with friends and roomates
19 people said that just one person pays and the rest are reimbursed to them later
15 people faced unequal distribution of cost as a problem
12 people had the challenge of knowing how to split a bill
51% of them said they would like to have the bill seperately
Affinity Mapping
I conducted affinity mapping to identify patterns and relationships in the user pain points described while doing the user research.
I was able to categorize it into 4 main problems
No clarity on the orders
Unjustified split with tax
Followups to pay
Awkwardness
Compitator analysis
After having an understanding of the problem, I went on to check how others are solving these problems and conducted a competitor analysis. I compared with 4 main competitors and saw many gaps and opportunities in them
Brainstroming Different Ideas
Idea 1
The restaurants can have menu scanners the customers can scan the menu, choose how many people and add the food items for each person and order
Idea 2
Open the app and create a group , enter the total bill amount manually, add itmes and price against each person manually
Generate respective bills for each person and share.
Idea 3
Scan the receipt, detect items from the list, allow editing, add a number of people, drag and drop items under each person, generate bills individually and share it
Idea 4
Ask the restaurant waiter to separate the bill initially while ordering and place the order to the waiter individually.
Impact Effort Matrix
Information Architecture
This IA contains the minimum functionalities required in an app for anyone to split a bill. Other features can come as an enhancement in the later stages.
Task Flow
I am taking a successful red route that the user would follow to complete the task
Login/Signup
Enters home page
Clicks on the Scan the Bill button
captures the bill
Views the generated digital bill
Clicks next
Enters the number of people to split the bill
Edits the name of the people
Based on the orders, clicks on the dish name under each person
Shares the bill
Initial Sketches
Paper Prototype Testing
I conducted an initial level testing with 3 people and got some interesting feedback
1. The split bill page appears right after scanning which can be a misleading as the user might want to see the scanned bill first.
2. The user can’t relate to this new UI and creates a lot of cognitive load.
3. Dragging and dropping of the items might not be intuitive.
4. No clear view of the bill
Final Flows
Users can easily sign in through various methods
Home page with just one focus button and no distractions
A simple scanner UI like any other scanner to reduce the cognitive load of the user
The digital bill generated also allows the user to edit and make modifications accordingly
Users can type in the number of people they want to split the bill with
Based on the number entered, a list is generated.
The user can edit the names of the people they are dining with to avoid confusion
Based on the people's food orders, the user can click on the items to generate the bill.
Tax and other inclusive price is automatically distrubuted to the split amount as and when the user adds the menu item.
Users can easily share the bill with their peers through various mediums by clicking on share
An easy and
seamless way for
splitting your bills
Thank You :)
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