Venmo: Bill Splitting

Student Project 2022

A bill splitting feature that allows users to easily split bills for their friends to pay them back.

Role: Product Designer

Tools: Figma, Miro, Maze

Duration: 80 Hours

Background

Venmo allows you to pay and request money from your friends. At its core, Venmo provides a social way to pay your friends when you owe them money and don't want to deal with cash. But, users have to use a separate app to split bills or do the math on what is owed.

Problem

After paying for a group outing, users have to spend too much doing math to divide up the bill and individually Venmo requesting each person.

Challenge

Design an easy to use bill splitting feature that makes paying your friends back a quicker process and blends seamlessly with Venmo’s existing UI.

Time to dive in!

Research Goals

  • Discover how users split up group bills. By item? Equally?

  • Learn about user pain points when dividing up a group bill

  • Understand how they currently use Venmo

  • Get to know Venmo’s current UI and brand guidelines

Research Methods

  • User Interviews

  • Competitor Analysis

  • Venmo research

Getting to know the users

  • Participant #1

    Food Quality Supervisor
    26
    Male

  • Participant #2

    Assistant Video Editor
    26
    Female

  • Participant #3

    Teacher
    23
    Female

  • Participant #4

    Med School Student
    25
    Male

“I want to just split up the check by what everyone got, but when I put my card down to pay, I don’t feel like doing all that math. ”

— Participant #1

Key Takeaways

  • Participants will have one person pay for a group event and everyone else will pay them back at a later date

  • Participants will split bills up evenly just to save time even if some people will have to pay for more than they ordered

  • Everyone expressed wanting to deal with group bills as quickly as possible

To get to know the users a bit more, I performed user interviews. I had four participants and met with them over Zoom.

Sizing up the competition

Strengths

  • Pulls itemized list from photo of receipt

  • Connects to Venmo and PayPal

Weaknesses

  • Makes mistakes when pulling from photo

Strengths

  • Allows you to split bills evenly or by percentage

  • Connects with Venmo and PayPal

Weaknesses

  • Doesn’t let you split bills by item

What path will the users take?

With my research in hand, I was ready to start mapping out the user’s path to split their bill, so I made a task flow.

Ready to start designing!

Next, I was ready to start fleshing out some designs. I started my wireframes on paper and then made a cleaner version on Figma.

UI Design / Prototype

Check out this first prototype here!

94.4% of participants had direct success!

Once I had the screens built, I was eager to get some user opinions. I performed usability tests using Maze.co and had 20 participants.

85% of participants were successfully able to locate the Split button

95% of participants had direct success when assigning who was paying for each item

60% participants had no confusion when going through the task

There was some confusion..

I created an affinity map to help organize the findings from the usability tests in a more digestible way.

Key Takeaways

  • The flow was easy for participants to complete

  • Participants were confused about how the end amounts were calculated

Iterations

Finding: Participants were confused about how the app calculated the end amounts.

Design Decision: Added drop downs that show what was included for each person to get that end amount.

Finding: Participants felt like they were clicking a lot.

Design Decision: Instead of requesting each person one at a time, I added a “Send Requests” button to request all at once.

There was not a lot of actionable feedback from this round of usability tests, but people did express confusion. So, I decided to do a more specific test to make sure the item selection process is clear.

More testing!

Success! This test helped to confirm that the item selection process is clear and easy for the participants to navigate. Check out the prototype they used here!

Prompt for prototype: You paid for happy hour with your friends Andrew and Megan. You want to break up the receipt by item so they can pay you back. Please use the split feature and use a photo of your receipt to request your friends what they owe you.

100% of participants successfully completed the task

94% of participants were able to identify which items had not been selected yet

What’s next?

Since this was a student project, this is as far as these designs will go. But, if I were to move forward, my next steps would be:

  • More testing and iterating!

  • Build and test the path for manually entering the receipt

  • Handoff to developers

  • Ongoing testing and iterating the feature based on customer feedback and analytics