Sharing Group Expenses through a P2P Payment App in Hong Kong
My last project in PayMe App was about sharing expenses. At that time, there was an initiative to make payments more social and less transactional. Hence, I kept this in mind when I worked on a feature that aimed to enable people share their group expenses by using the mobile app.
I was happy to have contributed my vision of splitting bills within a group. Here are some of the considerations during the early stages of this project:
Questions
Before I worked on any design drafts, these were some of the main questions that I started with:
- Are group expenses a one-time event?
- Do people share expenses equally or accordingly?
- When do people pay back their share?
Assumptions
I started on the premise that sharing expenses would always be made with a group of people, and that people tend to form habits. For example, it is highly likely that people would go to lunch with the same group, and possibly go back to the same restaurants that they visited before.
I also assumed that people would only do enough effort to get what they need. Hence, I assumed that the one who paid for a group expense would most likely split the expense into the total number of people in a group.
After creating a task flow and several user flows, I was able to join the first round of usability testing with user interview for this project. It would be interesting to do more research in learning about how different people manage a shared group expense. With a tool to share expenses, do people manage to get back what they were owed? Aside from checking the task completion and success rates, it would be interesting to know when people usually settle their accounts. Are people more likely to pay their shares right after a bill is split, if not then when? How does this affect the probability of people paying back?
This was pre-pandemic in April 2019, when people freely dined out and went to trips as a group. Sharing group expenses probably lessened due to the pandemic. I wonder, would people prefer to settle a bill separately right after a lunch out or not? It would be interesting to learn how shared expenses might have changed during and after the pandemic.
This is the current released version of the ‘Split bill’ feature in PayMe App.
After a bill has been paid, people could now make a request to split the bill with other people by using PayMe App for consumers. Most of my designs didn’t make it in the final output, but I’m happy that some of it have made it in this new feature.
Thanks for reading! 💗
