MoneyMate
Where paying bills is a team play.
Product Design, Branding
MoneyMate is an app that allows users to split multiple bills with friends by sending them a balance between all bills versus individual requests and payments, creating a friendlier online etiquette to these regular tasks.
Duration
8 weeks
Team
Product Designer, Natalie Fajardo
Product Manager, Pedro Arias
Front-End Developer, Zach Shearer
Back-End Developer, Kehinde Jacob
Skills
UI/UX Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, Sketching, Information Architecture, User Research and Usability Testing
Goals
The idea for MoneyMate originated from our team's own personal experiences and friend's stories of their struggles with their recent trips and outings. We recognized the need for a more efficient, seamless workflow of dividing billsand paying others without utilizing multiple applications and the task becoming frustrating. The process can become lengthy as well as a human, we are forgetful.
To address these issues, the team developed MoneyMate, a bill splitting app that makes it easy for friends to coordinate payments and balances. With MoneyMate, guests can simply take a picture of the bill and assign who owes what over multiple bills. The app automatically keeps all this information for when all the users are ready for payment using balances. This streamlined process makes it easier for guests by having less throwing money back and forth.
Understanding the P2P Realm
Discovering the Problem Space
Half Of Payment App Users Are Splitting Bills In New Ways Due To Inflation
According to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 53% of 18- to 25-year-olds and 50% of 26- to 41-year-olds report relying on peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps more often now as a result of rising costs. No other age group has a majority of users indicating inflation is prompting them to use payment apps more frequently.
30% of young adult users say there’s a “Venmo Vulture” in their life, someone who regularly sends petty payment requests. Most users (86%) agree that anything under $5 is a petty amount not worth requesting.
With bill-splitting apps on the rise, formal etiquette can become tricky. Although these tasks can be easy, it is also subtlely confrontational. (Link)
Competitive Analysis
Peer-to-peer payment
Venmo: Cannot split payments between multiple people and send multiple payments at once to multiple users. Notifications for payments helps users to be reminded of unpaid payments.
Zelle: Direct deposit and logging into banks repeatedly can become frustrating.
Cash App: Can send payments to multiple people, but does not send reminders like Venmo.
Bill splitting:
Splitwise: Does not have an import receipt feature and itemization must be inputted manually.
/Tab: Only takes in bills with tips and percentages and the design is too minimal not user-friendly.
Settle Up: All users must be signed up and paying for Settle Up, this comes inconvenient for on-the-spot calculations.
Conclusion:
The bill splitting competitors do not have P2P payment integration. The competitors are solely a tool to split an individual bill at a time.
Analyzing the User
Takeaways from Interviews
We conducted 10 in-depth, open-question interviews with individuals who have specific bill sharing experiences, whether that be a dinner, a group trip, or regular monthly payments such a rent. The results tended to splitting bills that were more spontaneous and not reoccurring. We identified these 4 main points after conducting our research:
- When in groups, more than 3, it's stressful to know exactly who needs to pay what
- When someone pays for you, you tend to forget how much you owe and to whom
- Planning ahead isn't as straightforward if plans change within the group, there wasn't an automatic way of sharing, inputing, and changing expense data
- Users tend to not think ahead of time before going out, how they would need to divide their bill and when
Persona
Creating the persona, we understand the goals of the user, which is knowing the money balance in one step.
Defining the Problem Space
User Flows
Defining the goals, a streamlined user flow was created, trying to implement the least amount of interactions between users. Having the process be abridged by automation makes the payment method convenient and not socially awkward for all of the users.
Lo-fi Wireframing
After the flows were finalized, I tested the low-fidelity wireframes to 3 users to gain feedback. Many questions arose about inviting users and adding users to a group. Along with this, having features to split items as items can be shared say during a dinner. Conversation around how many bills not being split evenly and the culture of bill sharing apps should more focus on that pain point.
Hi-Fi Design
