Helping people on Glovo split bills fast & without awkwardness
Split the Bill: feature design for Glovo (UX project)
This was a project done with Ironhack’s UX/UI bootcamp course in Barcelona, with Victoria Micheva.
Who’s Glovo? Glovo is a Spanish courier service that provides purchases and delivering through its mobile app.
What was the brief? Adding a ‘split the bill’ feature to Glovo’s existing app as seamlessly as possible.
Our story begins with research.
How do people really split their bills?
To get an idea how people pay generally for their goods when others are involved (whether that be online or in-person), we did 2 initial interviews.
From there, we wanted to see what others were doing already with some benchmarking. We used Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics to evaluate how successfully people were tackling split bill features. Monzo, Uber and Verse were key players in this evaluation — all of which has very smooth split bill functionalities but with varying approaches to user flow and flexibility.
With an idea of the market place (what was already out there) and a survey, we conducted a further 8 interviews that were more focussed. Through affinity diagramming, we found some common themes when it came to what was important to people when splitting bills:
Convenience & time saving is key
Awkwardly asking for repayments is the worst
People hate maths — avoid counting who owes what
Splitting bills can be a vibe killer
What did we want to achieve?
With research under our belts we decided to get really clear about what we were doing, why and for whom.
To settle on a problem statement we used How Might We cards, to diverge on the possible opportunities and better understand our priorities. From here, we decided on the following problem statement:
How might we help people on Glovo split bills fast and without awkwardness?
So, who would this be for?
We were very clear on the fact there would be two sides to the feature of splitting a bill: one person using the app (initiating the split bill) and the other(s) accepting their money request. To have specifics in mind we developed two user personas as fictional figures to have in-mind as a representative of the user: traits, behaviours & patterns of a bigger body of people
So, with that in mind, I first introduce you to our primary user persona: Diego.
Diego is based in Barcelona, he’s 28 and orders food a couple of times a week. When paying, he needs convenience and things to happen quickly to he can focus on what’s important: spending time with his friends.
And, our secondary user persona: Helena.
Let’s jump into their shoes
I’d like you to imagine the following scenario:
Diego has his cousin, Helena, at his house. They have a lot to talk about and are looking for something quick and easy for dinner. Pizza from Glovo is the go-to.
Diego gets to paying the bill and they decide to split it. Both hate wasting time and awkward conversations about money but luckily Glovo has a new feature which puts their minds at rest.
Without further ado, I’d like you imagine you’re Diego in the scenario and you’re on his phone with this prototype. I invite you to try different ways of splitting the bill and explore the flexibility Diego has.
And now, for the other side of the story see here for Helena’s phone.
Now, how did we get from A to B?
You’ve seen our final design, how did we get there? There were 3 overarching stages in the process, which you can see here:
With research, a defined problem and a persona in mind, we began thinking out how the user flow could materialise which is what you see noted here:
At the start of the process we began developing the feature with the split bill option appearing after the initial payment was made (so there would be no delay in the orders). With this user flow, we began sketching. These quickly developed into a paper prototype allowing us to get user feedback as soon as possible.
What we quickly realised was that we needed to amend the user flow so that the split bill option was before the initial payment, why?
One of the main points from our research was avoid awkward conversations about money at all costs. If people repay one another post initial payment, reminders between friends and awkward conversations will still be had (we would not be reaching our goal)
Glovo is not a bank, and shouldn’t worry about money people after an order has been made if not to do with the order itself
How would people pay after order been made if Glovo if not going to act as an intermediate? You can see where the complications arose
So we had a rethink with one question in mind: how can we allow for split bill to happen before initial payment made without delaying the order?
The person initiating the payment authorises his card for the full order’s payment but with a delayed charge of 15 minutes, why?
Glovo has authorised payment as an assurance to process the order immediately
The user’s friends have 15 minutes to pay their share otherwise the order will be processed as normal
That way there a three-fold positive outcome: 1) avoid awkward conversations between friends about money (they pay or they don’t in those 15 minutes, that’s it); 2) Glovo gets their order, only varying who might be covering it; 3) there is no delay in processing the order.
Once the user flow was set, it was just a matter of making it as clear as possible for Diego and Helena to find useful. These changes were made based on user feedback on design iteration. Here are a few key changes made:
Once we were at the point of high-fidelity, we wanted to make the experience as sleek and enjoyable as possible. To do this we did a couple of things:
Careful consideration of matching the visual design to the Glovo brand
Add illustrations to aid engagement and understanding
Consider how animation might play a part in the feature (using Principle)
See here again the final prototypes of Diego and Helena.
If we were to move forward with this, what would that look like?
Explore how the interface of multiple users in the split bill would be
Review Glovo’s payment methods (during research this kept on coming up, although we were focussed on the split bill pathway, we would have liked to review Glovo’s payment options more broadly)
Further testing on both sides of the user (Helena & Diego) and iterate the design further
Even with a well-defined brief, good research
is essential to ensure the experience is user-centred
Benchmarking is insightful for interface specifics
Listen to user feedback even if you don’t like it
Trust the process — follow each step, make a plan, include a break ;)
Thank you for reading! If you have any feedback or comment don’t hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn or at [email protected].
