Facing the Dreaded Question

All of the good food and laughter that has filled the room for the past few hours comes to a grinding halt when that dreaded question is asked at the restaurant table: “so who wants to put their card down for the meal?” This question isn’t dreaded because one person will have to pay for it all, Rather, it’s a question of who will put their card down and face a long road ahead of them of calculating the amount each person owes for the tax and tip, distributing a picture of the receipt, and following up with people days and weeks later to make sure they get paid back for the meal. And even if everyone pays, who knows if the cardholder will get paid back in full — the calculations sometimes get lost between the talking and laughter that instantly resumes once a gracious volunteer agrees to put their credit card down — but the missing bits and pieces that each person forgets to add on to their calculations add up. The cardholder not only carries the burden of ensuring that people pay them back, but sometimes they even face an economic loss, merely due to human error in calculations. While restaurants occasionally offer to split the check so that each person can pay with their own credit card, more often than not they are unable to do this, especially for groups larger than 4 people, which is when the splitting via cash apps like Venmo gets more complicated.

The Problem

When embarking upon any shared payment endeavor, people want to be able to easily determine the amount of money they owe their friends (or the amount they are owed by their friends), so that they can pay the exact correct amount of money back to their friends (and get all of the money they are owed from their friends). People currently can’t do that well because 

1. There is no calculator that totals up the amount of money that each person owes, accounting for all of the items they purchased as well as their portion of the tip and tax in one simple step

2. There is no shared platform where everyone would have access to this data to see the full receipt and the amount they owe 

3. It requires a lot of effort and math to accurately determine who owes who what, and many times, this math isn’t executed properly resulting in someone losing money unnecessarily 

Researching the Users

When looking into the struggles of paying people back for shared expenses, I originally thought people would get frustrated with how they were making many back and forth payments to certain friends because they share so many expenses — especially for people living together or going on vacation together. However, after interviewing several users between the ages of 18 and 26, I found that people were most frustrated with the cardholder’s burden — that is, all of the responsibilities and further actions that the cardholder must take in order to get their money back. From all of my user interviews, I came to the following 3 conclusions and corresponding insights: 

• People prefer to use cash apps to pay their friends back for money than to be the person who puts their credit card down for the shared expense.

  • People don’t trust their friends to pay them back for the correct amount. They don’t trust that people’s manual calculations for shared costs will add up to exactly what it should be, and also do not want to be responsible for reminding people to pay them back. 

  • People don’t like having large charges on their credit cards, and would rather pay with a cash app to settle that cost. 

• The larger the group of people, the more difficult it is to split the bill

  • Larger social settings make bill splitting more difficult because there are more items that were ordered that need to be kept track of, and it can be hard for one person to communicate with everyone else in a social setting.

• People don’t like venmo requesting everyone who went to a certain occasion for the money they owe. 

  • People feel bad when asking people to pay them back for meals

  • Requesting for the money in the app is a lot of work, because one person then has to send many different requests (like sending 10 individual messages instead of sending it in a group chat with everyone in it)

Finding a Better Way to Pay

Following my user research, I recruited a few other product designers to help me in a targeted brainstorming session. I filled them in on my user research findings and led this brainstorming session in the following manner: 

1. First, we focused on developing as many “How might we…” statements as possible within 10 minutes, with each statement pondering a new way in which we could address the problems identified in my user research.

2. Next, we aggregated these statements into several areas for improvement. These categories that we formed were as follows: 

   1. Increasing trust in cash-apps 

   2. Simplifying splitting checks 

   3. Decreasing payment-related disruption to social settings 

   4. Encouraging smaller payments 

   5. Respecting different financial circumstances

   6. Decreasing the cardholder’s burden 

3. I chose to proceed with the following 3 solution spaces: simplifying splitting checks, decreasing the cardholder’s burden, and respecting different financial circumstances. I chose these 3 spaces because the “How might we” statements included in these categories aligned most closely with my users’ frustrations over calculating payments and getting all of their money back which came up in every one of my user interviews. 

4. We then ideated 30 solutions for each of the opportunity areas that we chose. 

5. Next, we aggregated these solutions into the following solution spaces: 

   1. Automatic calculations in a “group” space within the app 

   2. Push notification payment reminders 

   3. Delayed balance settling 

   4. In app messaging space 

6. Ultimately, I did a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), as well as a dive into the feasibility and impact of the different solution spaces. I decided to proceed with several feature ideas that we brainstormed within the “Automatic calculations within a ‘group’ space in the app” solution space, because of its high feasibility and high impact parameters.

   1. High feasibility: all of the features brainstormed to be part of this feature exist in some capacity in another app, which proves that this feature is feasible from a backend developer perspective, in terms of being able to create the code for this feature. For example, the notion of creating a “group” parallels the functionality of creating a group chat or a shared photo album. The ability to take a picture of the receipt and generate a digital version of the receipt draws upon text reading technology that translation apps, such as Google Translate, utilize in which people can take a picture of written text and the app will create a digital translation of the text.

   2. High impact: Based upon my user research, a feature that facilitates the calculation process for meals (or any other shared experience) would have a high impact, because people are most frustrated with how the chaos of social settings and human error renders cost splitting calculations to be unreliable, leaving the cardholder at a loss of money oftentimes. This feature aims to decrease the cardholder’s burden by (1) calculating their total meal price for users to demand less effort from users and also ensure accuracy in calculations and (2) set up the payment for users after calculating their total price, so that users can pay their friends back within a minute.

The Solution

Ultimately, I decided the most technologically feasible but culturally impactful feature would be one that energizes users to make groups in Venmo. In these groups, one person can identify themself as the “cardholder,” to indicate if they put their card down for the bill. Any person in the group can then take a picture of the receipt (after they have already included tip and tax). The app will read the text and numbers from the receipt and generate a digital version of the receipt. Users can select the items off of the digital receipt that they ordered and then click “calculate my total.” The app will add up the total of the items from the menu that the user clicked on, as well as tip and tax (divided by the number of people in the group) and show users a receipt of the amount of money they owe the person who indicated themselves as the “cardholder.” The user can then click a button to automatically pay the other person in the group who indicated themself to be the cardholder.

Designing Into Reality 

The Process Continues…

One thing I’ve learned about design over the years is that the process never really ends. Good design is all about iterations — designing a mockup, testing it with users, and modifying the mockup based upon that user feedback. I started this independent project about a month ago, and am continuing to user test, and edit my prototype based upon the feedback I get from users. So far, this is what I know from the users:

• Users like the home screen as the entry point for this feature.

• Users want push notifications.

  • Users like the idea of having automatic push notifications to remind a member of the Venmo group to pay the cardholder back if they have not yet paid them anything.

• Users want instructions.

  • Users need more instructions about when to take a picture of the receipt — a common question they would come to me with after using the prototype is if the picture should be taken pre-tip or post-tip.

  • While I originally intended for users to take the picture of the receipt after calculating their tip (so that it would be included in the digital receipt) this question got me thinking about additional sub-features that I could integrate into this feature. For example, I was thinking about creating a feature in which users could select the percentage they would like to tip after taking a picture of their receipt. Then, users wouldn’t need to calculate their tip themselves, and the indicated tipping amount would automatically be added to the user’s digital receipt so that a portion of the tip and tax are still included in each individual’s total price calculations.

As I continue iterating through new features and mockups for this prototype, I will keep the results of my user testing and user research, as well as the specifics of the problem I originally diagnosed at the core of all of my decisions. In order to make a successful new product, I believe referring back to the user research, user testing results, and original problem when making decisions is of the utmost importance. After all, if the users don’t find a design to be intuitive and easily usable, it would be impossible to generate meaningful social change through these new features. Thus, while I still need to do more extensive user testing before finalizing my prototype, the MVP (minimum viable product) is as follows: