Kanakku

PROJECT TYPE AND ROLE

Personal Project, Product Designer

PLATFORM

Android

TIMELINE

February - March 2019

Overview

If you are wondering what Kanakku means, it is a Tamil word for calculation and accounts.
Kanakku aims to make splitting of bills between friends in a group effortless and helps the user to maintain long time accounts of the money transactions.

Problem

When eating out with friends kills the fun!
Eating out with friends and settling the bill among everybody is a complex and tedious process. Most often, one of the friends pays the entire bill amount, and the rest agree to pay back their share of the bill later. The bill payer also ends up calculating each one’s share, and keeps a track of who has and hasn’t paid. Ironically, it is the lender who feels embarrassed reminding others to pay back. Sometimes, it can create misgivings between friends. This whole exercise dampens the experience of hanging out with friends, and kills the spirit of good fun in groups.

Target Users

  • Primary target users are college students.
  • Secondary target users can be anyone who wants to maintain accounts and share bills with others, like colleagues.

Research and Validation

User

I conducted user interviews of 12 students. I asked them to share their dinner outing experiences with friends. The interviews were semi structured, so I let them talk and asked them questions if and when I needed clarifications or any detailed explanation.
There were two common methods of paying a bill,

  • Either one person pays the bill and collects it back from others later.
    Problems Faced
    A person who paid the bill has to keep a record of who should pay and how much he/she should pay. He/she has to constantly keep reminding others to settle up as they never get their money on time.
  • Or one person collects cash from everybody on-the-spot and then settles the bill.
    Problems Faced
    Splitting the bill and collecting cash on-the-spot often leads to awkward situations. Some might also feel embarrassed to collect cash in front of everyone.

Other general problems faced are,

  • In case the bill is split evenly among all, some people may have had to pay for things they did not have at all. Most common situation can be a vegetarian person paying extra while splitting the bill evenly, because the others had the more expensive non-vegetarian food.
  • Feeling embarrassed to constantly remind someone of their share to be paid back.
  • Sometimes splitting bills plate wise can become complex calculation when a single food item is shared by more than one person.
  • Bill has to be kept safe in case recalculation is required, or at least as a reference.

Market

I did a market research on some available apps for splitting bills and maintaining accounts. Here's some information I collected:

  • Except one, none of them had plate-wise splitting of bills. Also, the one which had it was just like an instant calculator - it did not have any payment and accounting features.
  • These apps were not adaptable for currencies other than dollars.
  • All of these required manual inputting of items and their prices, which involved almost the same amount of effort as using a normal calculator.
  • Splitwise, the most used bill sharing app among working professionals, was known only by 2 out of the 12 students.

Opportunity

From the user and market research data, I penned down a list of possible opportunities that can be included in the solution.

  • Allow users to split bills, pay bills, maintain long-time accounts to enable easier settling of dues among friends.
  • Minimize the input given by the users.
  • Make it suitable for other currencies including the Indian Rupee.

Ideation

I started ideating with collected information, working on ideal journey map and low fidelity wireframes. This was done to decide the ideal workflow of the users and for initial user testing.

Testing and Iterating

I did user testing with 6 students using low fidelity screens made of cardboards. The problems identified are as follows

  • Showing history in the form of groups was confusing.

  • Too much information was annoying.

  • Remind option did not give any feedback.
  • Getting the bill details by scanning was a bit confusing as it was new to the users.

Final Design

For the final screens, I chose shades if Purple shade as the primary color since its heavily associated with wealth.
Let me explain the final design with a user case scenario.

Srivatsan is a final year student of NIT Rourkela. He along with his friends planned for a dinner outing. They decided to go to Pizza Hut for dinner and to Kulfi House later for desert. Now let us see how they share and pay the bill without any difficulty.

Step 01

  • He creates a group.
  • He names the group.
  • He invites all of his friends to that group.

Step 02

  • He opens the group.
  • He adds the bill by scanning it.
  • He then splits the bill plate wise.
  • The app calculates each ones share and adds it to the respective person's card.
  • He pays the bill.

Step 03

  • Now they all go out for desert.
  • This time Deepak adds the bill and pays for it.
  • Deepak splits the bill equally as everyone had the same kulfi.
  • The app calculates each ones share and then directly links the information to the accounts screen.

Step 04

  • Now Srivatsan checks the history for pending and failed transactions.

Step 05

  • He then checks the due amounts that he has to settle up with his friends and pays it.

Step 06

  • At last he sends a reminder to his friend asking for his share of money to be paid back.

Learnings

Some micro interactions while splitting the bill could've made this app an even better experience. After testing the final iteration, users were able to imagine themselves using this app on a daily basis and were satisfied with the novel experience.
Yes, this is my first UI/UX design project. I hope to improve my skills with experience.

Back to Home