Case Study - Shared Expenses
Transaction splitting and ongoing management of bills and shared expenses
Lead UX Designer & Product Manager
For this initiative I acted in the dual capacity of lead designer and product manager.
In a design capacity, I led the design of the brand new Shared Expenses feature, natively built for the CommBank App’s iOS and Android platforms. Leading a team of three designers (mix of UX and UI) and working closely with the UX research team, outputs included in-depth secondary and primary research to identify and frame the opportunity space, before moving the project into execution with iterative designs, informed by ongoing usability testing.
In a product manager capacity, I managed a junior product manager, and led two scrum teams through discovery, solution design, build and delivery/release milestones including an outcomes based backlog and go-to-market learning canvas.
Background & Context
The Commonwealth Bank is Australia’s largest and most recognised financial institution, capturing half of the country’s market share
I led an initiative tasked with identifying opportunity areas to attract high-value relationships that could be used to lift acquisition rates and grow long-term customer loyalty
Opportunity Sizing
Quantitive research revealed shared financial experiences as an area of high pain point and high frequency
Desirability for solutions in these areas was also high, indicating an opportunity to explore more deeply
Ideation
I ran ideation workshops with the involvement of engineers, architects and relevant business stakeholders to gather and generate ideas that would feed into concepts and solutions
Research
Working with two UX researchers, diary studies, focus group interviews and contextual inquiries were used to generated qualitative research results aimed at validating customer pain points, testing concepts and gaining understanding of the different customer journeys involved in a range of shared experiences e.g. group dinners, shared holidays, shared households
Synthesis
People have shared financial experiences with every level of their social circle; amongst friends, households and external groups
The complexity of managing these experiences increases with the life of the expense and the number of people involved e.g. once-off expense between friends, ongoing tab with households, multiple participants involved for shared events and/or partnerships
Converging on an Opportunity
Consolidated view to keep track from one source of truth
Minimise effort to calculate and split
Integrated payments to facilitate instant payment & settlement for less IOUs
Framing the Product
Vision
In order to take the frustration and awkwardness out of chasing your friends for money, our product will provide you with an easy way to manage shared expenses
It’ll let you track what’s owed, to who, and effortlessly collect payment. No more disagreements. No more awkward conversations
Getting Ready for Execution
Storyboarding with a visual designer
Mapping out use cases and story mapping
Creating initial sketches and flows for the scrum team
Delivery Phase
Early interactive prototypes were tested with customers to get a sense of usability
Ongoing refinement through design critiques and a usability testing cadence of every two weeks
Working with a UI designer to finalise detailed designs
The Product
Roughly 4 months following beta release and no marketing:
Close to 85K expenses created and shared
Over 34K contacts added to in-app address book