Can we make Splitwise a bit “wiser”?
It has been more than an year that I have been on my full-time job and stayed in a shared accommodation. Since then, Splitwise has been such a saviour in managing my shared expenses with flatmates, friends, and acquaintances.
As Splitwise simply puts it, it allows one to split expenses with friends — it has certainly done that and much more for me.
Interestingly, even though Splitwise has its own shortfalls, I haven’t come across of any other app that caters to such a critical need and with the same popularity. Splitwise has a whopping 1 million downloads with positive rating of 4.6 on the just on android playstore.
Just like any successful application, signing up was fairly simple as I logged in through my gmail account.It had the most simplistic interactions where one can split expenses with an individual or within a group. I have been using it almost daily to log small groceries I might have purchased or to update expenses made by my flatmates. I have developed a habit to enter the tiniest of updates so that I don’t forget as well as a record is maintained. However, every successful application leaves trails of UX bugs. As an avid user and a design practitioner, I thought I should take a stab at improving (objectively) its android application as it stands today-
1. Don’t make the user think
There can be a couple of thoughts in a user’s mind which might trigger a payment from a Splitwise listing-
Scenarios
’Joe has been cribbing about the pending amount from our last party, I should let me pay him at the earliest.’
‘I owe Alice 4k, it’s a large amount, I should pay her immediately.’
‘Month end is here let me settle all expenses’
‘I’ve met Kira for the first time, I should pay her first, my friends wont mind if I pay them later.”
In all these instances, we see that the action is pivoted on either the people or the expenses. While the current experience is that of seeing an alphabetical list of all the people added to your Splitwise list, the iOS experience shows tabs named ‘you owe’, ‘you are owed’ and ‘total balances’ followed by the people associated with the categories.
Interestingly the android app has a filter icon which lets the user view the information in the form of ‘all balances’, ‘you owe’ and ‘you are owed’. But this icon looks nothing like a filter icon and is placed in an obscure location with reasons only known to Splitwise.
Design Suggestion
If both the approaches are equally legit, could the android users have something that allows a view toggle- With people or expenses. This can either be positioned upfront or via settings in the hamburger menu. However, there are no data related settings in this pane currently. This way the android user is not stunned by an entirely new experience all at once and one can maintain familiarity if they switch their devices (a more common phenomenon than we expect).
2. Complete an end-to-end scenario for the user
Scenario
Joe, Alice and Kira plan to go shopping to Pheonix mall over the weekend. At the checkout counter, Alice bills all the products on her card. This bill contains products purchased by all of them. She comes back opens the calculator and calculates the amounts owed by Joe and Kira to her. She creates one event against each of their names and adds this amount. As soon as Joe sees this he makes a Paytm payment to Alice.
In this scenario, there are multiple touch points when the user has to come out of the application to be able to produce a more cogent settlement plan for everyone in the group. Splitwise needs to address these pain points so that the user remains engaged within the product for as long as possible, without needing to exit even for a short period of time.
Design Suggestions
- We can have an integrated calculator from where the amounts can be directly added at entries (as shown in the figure above). In other words, instead of invoking a keypad in traditional way, we can invoke a calculator instead (as most interactions are quite similar).
2. Can the application smartly read digital expenditures and pop them up as soon as the user opens the application. Something like ‘Hey! you seem to have made a purchase at Marks and Spencers do you wish to split this bill?’ Considering the current state of the technology, this can be made possible if the user uses any of the e-payment methods such as samsung pay or apple pay. Another iteration on this could be using fine location from smartphone GPS or any check-ins that users do on facebook or foursquare. Splitwise can at least prompt the user if they want to add an expense. I believe a just-in-time prompting of this sort will trigger more responses and app usage than relying on user’s own consciousness to add expenses manually. Even though this could have some privacy challenges, it is still a direction worth exploring.
3. Can we add the payment details of the users by linking Splitwise to a payment gateway like Paytm or may be introduce its own wallet (will come in very handy after demonetization). This will make transactions as smooth as a breeze. It is common for applications to host a set of connected applications (e.g., Samsung S-health allows users to pull in data from apps like Lark and Strava). Splitwise can also introduce users to a set of payment gateways compatible with Splitwise. Who knows some of these gateways (or e-wallets) may hit more installs with this!
3. Being Human
Group dynamics has been a complicated subject for personality and social psychologists for years. It is too puerile of us to expect computers to be that smart. A group can be made up of friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. Splitwise needs to keep in mind these complexities that humans innately bring along.
Scenario
Joe goes out with some of Alice’s friends all of whom he is meeting for the first time. They go together for a party and Joe ends up paying the bill. He wants to quickly calculate the share for each so that they can pay him in cash. The division gets a little complex as the bill is not split equally. He wishes to use Splitwise to quickly calculate the expenses for him without having to go through the trouble of adding all the new folks on the app.
Design Suggestion
For non-Splitwise users, can we temporarily add users (to stay for a brief period of time) to leverage on Splitwise’s ability to churn out complex calculations ? And have quick and easy ways(QR’s, OTP?) to add existing users to a new account for settlement. This may sound bizarre considering how innovators are interested in retaining people for as long as they can. But who knows, this might turn out be an unusual onboarding process.
Scenario
A sudden reunion trip that lasting 7 days is planned by Alice’s grad school.
Design Suggestion
We can allow a limited timeline group that fades away with time. Splitwise can keep the group alive for say only ten days. This way Splitwise can also pressure such groups to settle-up as soon as possible before the group is disabled. It’ll work on some people I know for sure ;-).
Scenario
Jill shops for groceries for her flat. In the bill, she has a couple of items she has bought exclusively for herself and wants to let her flatmate know of this calculation.
Design Suggestion
Allow the user to annotate on bills, add multiple bills to an expense as it makes it much easier and transparent for the user on the other end to make sense of the added expenses. Or process bill images (e.g. e-Kincare application does that for medical bills). A collaborative annotations could be helpful if your group members happen to be non-collocated.
Scenario
Joe has a group with this flatmates. One of them makes multiple changes in their daily expenses making it difficult for him to trace back to the original expenses.
Design Suggestion
Can we have a ‘back in time’ experience so that the user can go back at a particular time stamp to get to see what their expense logs were say in the past week? This could be useful if you happen to plan a similar meet-up or a trip, and would want to revisit expenses to plan more efficiently.
4. Show me how you did it
The ‘simplify expenses’ feature, although well intended, often leaves the users confused as to what exactly happened in the background. Since it is a matter of expenses, people want to stay as clear as possible on dividing expenses. Often users end up doing all the calculations manually to ensure that Splitwise has estimated things correctly. Isn’t this frustrating?
Design Suggestion
Show a summary of the calculation that the system did to come up to the simplified amount. Or an interesting visualisation of how expense was calculated. This does not need to be a “in your face” feature. Sitting in the backdrop, this feature can come in handy in cases of complicated expenses. It may very well play the role of that one guy/girl in the group who does all the calculations and explains it to everyone.
5. When the going gets complex, don’t make it even more complex
Imagine a scenario of a week long vacation with your gang of 8. It becomes almost impossible to track who paid for what with the current Splitwise experience. One might have to make endless individual entries no wonder people often resort to the old fashioned spreadsheet for such scenarios.
Design Suggestion
Design experiences which make data entry and calculations easy for large groups and several small expenses. May be borrow some patterns from spreadsheets? Currently for each expense a new entry has to be created which can get tedious in the above mentioned scenarios. Or encourage an in the moment data entry with easier input methods (e.g. voice).
That said, Splitwise is a very utilitarian application, which continues to relieve stress from the lives of all its users (mostly youngsters in shared living). I believe It can benefit by adding a bit more transparency in its background processes, considering it is an expense and finances related app. We know how paranoid people can be about their expenses ;-). In particular, I believe user experience design can certainly help bridge this gap and this article is a step in that direction. Since you have read till here, would love to get your feedback :-).
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to my flatmate, Umang for hearing out my muddled thoughts and sharing a few Splitwise experiences of her own.
