Billy

A mobile app that helps the budget-conscious consumer in the US and Germany keep track of their subscriptions and save money with easy cancellations, custom alerts, notifications, and hidden price hacks.

OVERVIEW

CLIENT
Billy (hypothetical)

MY ROLE
UX/UI Design, Research, Branding, Visual Design

TEAM MEMBERS
solo project with mentor feedback

SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS
Design a mobile app in 2 weeks for a subscription
and billing fintech app with the US and Germany
as target markets.

SUMMARY
A startup that helps users keep track of their recurring charges like bills and subscriptions has a web app and are looking to launch a mobile app in the US and Germany to increase market reach. Given the time constraint, I conducted rapid research and user testing that helped guide the design of the mobile app.

SOLUTION
An iOS app that helps budget-conscious consumers in the US and Germany keep track of their current charges and save money through custom alerts, easy subscription cancellations, notifications, and hidden price hacks.

THE PROBLEM

A tech startup has a web app that keeps track of all of your recurring bills and subscription fees on websites, apps, services, etc. They help users save money by lowering their bills and canceling their subscriptions for them. Right now, the company only benefits from desktop users, but they know that adding a mobile-friendly version of their product will significantly increase their market reach and be used by a broader audience.

A startup looking for growth opportunities and product adoption.

Presented Business Goals:

Create a mobile-friendly version of their product to increase their market reach and broaden audience adoption. The mobile version needed to include (1) a dashboard to get a comprehensive view on spending of all subscriptions, (2) The ability to cancel a subscription before renewal, and (3) notify the user of upcoming due dates.
Increase their user base by expanding to Germany.

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Market research revealed that the company didn't have a key differentiator. With this in mind, I thoroughly conducted usability testing to insure the app had a superior user experience from its competitors while seeking unique value propositions. Localization proved more time consuming than originally estimated, realizing that localization is more complex than a language translation and I had to refer to various apps in the European market to understand differences in mental models as well.

Set Custom Notifications for Full Control

One of the user stories was to notify users of their renewal dates on recurring charges. Giving users the power to set custom alerts gives them more control over their ability to monitor and take action on their bills and subscriptions.

Upon their first Login in the Billy app, users would receive a prompt to opt-in to push notifications, both default ones that Billy sends as well as the ones user's create themselves.

Effortlessly Cancel a Subscription

For the next user story, Billy gives users the power to save money and reduce needless spending by unsubscribing straight from the app. The flow was made quick and easy to accomodate users on the go! No more annoying phone calls or sales pitches to suffer through.

Add a Subscription to Have a Comprehensive View On Spending

Users need the ability to add subscriptions to the app in order to maintian a comprehensive view on their spending.

For this two-week sprint, I designed the manual flow to add a recurring charge, which would ensure users are able to track all their subscriptions on the app.

Account syncing would greatly streamline the setup process, but considering the high level of effort and the inevitability that not all instutions will support third party syncing, this would be a feature to prioritize in a future round of product development.

PROCESS

I decided to follow IDEO's human-centered design process to ensure that my solution was supported by research and user feedback by conducting:

Competitive analysis.
User survey (42 people total).
Proto personas and journey mapping.
Low and high fidelity prototypes.
Two rounds of usability testing.

UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE

Competitive analysis revealed a red ocean

I evaluated Trim, True Bill, and Track My Subs which revealed that Billy didn't have a unique value proposition. In order for the company to grow, it would have to do more than add a mobile platform to its product offering.

Insights from Competitive Analysis:

Billy's offerings are identical to its competitors.
Search and filter allows people to get a more comprehensive and streamlined view of their monthly spending, but not all competitors do this.
Customized alerts give users more control over monitoring.
A dashboard that visualizes month by month spending will help users identify past price increases.

Users don't necessarily want to cancel their subscriptions, but they want to save money and worry about hidden price increases.

This first challenge with this project was the project deadline and deciding on the best research methods. With limited time to plan and coordinate user interviews, I decided to conduct a short questionnaire with open-ended questions which uncovered insights on how peopele currently stay on top of their recurring charges and their past cancellation experiences.

Key Insights from survey participants:

Cancelling can be a lengthy and annoying process.
When cancelling, users prefer if they can save money and will likely keep the subscription if they are offered a lower price.
Often, users cancel subscriptions due to poor service or hidden price increases, not to save money.

Users are busy and need flexibility so they can take control of their finances.

Creating personas and user journey maps based on the target audience and survey insights helped me identify user pain points and opportunities, including receiving notifications during times that fit with their schedule and designing an efficient, streamlined process for managing their subscriptions.

DEFINE

After reviewing insights from research and my personas, I formulated my problem statement, focused on designing a superior user experience: How might we design a streamlined mobile app experience for the budget-conscious individual who wants to keep track and save money on their recurring charges, to launch in the US and German markets?

I reassessed the user stories to consider all critical user flows.

Research insights revealed that the provided user stories outlined in the business goals needed to be expanded to include adding a recurring charge to monitor and maintain a comprehensive view on spending.

DESIGN & VALIDATE

Sketches and User Testing

I conducted 5 remote usability tests of my sketches, prototyped in the Marvel app, assigning tasks to be completed based on the user stories.

There was an 80% task completion rate.

Results:

One user was unable to find the sort and filter option for the search task and 3 other testers struggled to find this option for some time before eventually finding it on their own.
One user mentioned he wanted a clearer distinction between read and unread notifications, but recognized this may be clearer with the visual designs.
Clearer icons needed on the notifications tab indicating fluctuation in pricing for a subscription.

High Fidelity Designs and Second Round of User Testing

I used user feedback from the first round of testing to inform the next iteration of my wireframes and organized a second round of testing. With this round I was able to fix the following issues revealed in the first round of tests:

optimize the user flow for canceling a subscription
Improve the Notifications screen to be more organized and easy to read.

User feedback from this round of testing included:

3 users were still struggling to complete the Search & Filter task (refer to image carousel below).
2 users was unable to cancel their subscription (refer to image carousel below).
One user stated they would like to see a confirmation after adding a new subscription.
3 users loved the visual design of the app.

Final Designs

I took all feedback from the second round of testing and finalized my designs before focusing on the German localization.

Localization is not simply a language translation challenge; different cultures mean different mental models.

With the designs finalized, I translated all the screens to German which presented its own challenges. I quickly learned to take careful consideration with translations, figure of speech will not translate verbatim in another language and formatting and layout may vary, such as with dates and currency.

RETROSPECTIVE

This project in the Springboard curriculum was a new addition and the prompt was lacking clarity and was weak in some areas (such as not providing the designs of an existing website mentioned in the prompt). Ambiguity is something that is often faced in the workplace though, so with that in mind, this was a great learning experience to learn how to make decisions and formulate assumptions when there are many unanswered questions.

Next Steps

In Germany, Android is used by 70% of cell phone users. With this in mind, I would iterate on the designs to create an Android version, or make changes to the current designs to work for both platforms, depending on time and resources allowed by the product and engineering teams.

Measuring Success

Lastly, in order to evaluate project success, I would work with developers to add data analytics that monitor the number of app downloads vs. deletions in both the German and US app stores as well as customer sign ups and retention.

Takeaways

Finding a powerful unique value proposition is more challenging without the ability to do thorough user research. Testers were interested in the "price hack" idea, but didn't seem excited about it. Using a survey was not sufficient to draw enough insights.

When designing a product for localization, take careful consideration of culture and differing mental models that may influence usability.

Even when the market is a red ocean, there can still be an opportunity for companies to come out on top with a superior UX.

Let's work together.

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