Cash App

New Feature Case Study

My Role : UX Designer

Timeline: 3 weeks

Scope: To design a bill splitting feature that's easy for customers to divide larger payments to other CashApp members

Cash App is a mobile payment service available in the United States and the United Kingdom that allows users to transfer money to one another using a mobile phone app.

Overview

In order to expand their service line, Cash App has proposed the implementation of a "bill-split" feature for frequent diners. The feature should allow customers to easily split large bills among fellow Cash App users, and customers should be fully aware of their portion of the bill.

Goals

1

Conduct research to understand user needs and industry landscape

2

Create bill split feature in accordance to user needs and existing style guides

3

Restructure the UI to seamlessly integrate bill-split

Approach

I used the Double Diamond process, which allowed me to develop my design by conducting regular experimentation to improve the creative process.

Discover

Research

Our team was looking to understand if users and non-users found Cash App to be more appealing with the inclusion of a bill-splitting feature, and if there were other methods that users were using to conduct bill-splitting. These were some of the objectives we sought to answer from the research we conducted :

1

Will having bill splitting on Cash App make the experience of splitting more attractive to current and new users?

2

Can the existing UI help make the integration of this feature more seamless with the current Cash App Interface?

3

Is there a want for bill-splitting?

Qualitative & Quantitative

I conducted our primary field research via social media by creating a Google Forms interview and posting the link on our stories to get our followers to complete the survey. I was able to get 16 primary responses through this method.

My secondary research method consisted of conducting a competitive analysis on the bill-splitting market and finding out what is working. This helped me understand what Cash App needs to provide to stand out from the competition:

Expanding outreach to allow for payment within apps and websites.
Add in a bill splitting feature that allows for seamless transactions.
Increase security features to make users feel more comfortable using Cash app

Link to Google Survey Interview

Link To Cash App S.W.O.T Analysis

Define

Analysis

Our team built an affinity map which helped me reexamine my assumptions, based on the insights from the user survey It was clear that:

Bill splitting is the most convenient and easiest to divide the costs of a bill– especially between big groups.
People are worried about the safety of Cash App
Cash App doesn't charge monthly fees, fees to send or receive money, inactivity fees, or foreign transaction fees

From survey responses, I constructed an empathy map and built out a persona. This ensured that concerns, wants, needs, and tone all served the user in their experience and to guide our decision process when iterating our first low-fidelity prototypes.

User Flow

I began designing the screens for Cash App, I created a user flow in Figma to map out the connections the users travel to arrive at their endpoint with extra security measures.

This diagram would work as an initial blueprint for which features would be available within the app for all users to take the same sequence of steps.

This is our basic flow that gave us a broad idea of how we would structure our new feature. We used this as as a springboard to add more steps to clarify the entire experience for the user.

We wanted our new feature to also include shared subscription bill splits among users who might share streaming services. Our bill-split feature would guide users through a set-up process to authorize shared apps and invite friends to split the subscription fees with them.

This is our final user flow that users would go through after setting up their account. Users would be given the choice to select a payment option depending on the type of transaction they want to do: one time payments for splitting receipts at restaraunts and bars, and repeated subscription payments for shared streaming services, etc. In both choices, they can choose how much money they want to split and who they choose to split with.

Develop

Wireframes

Now that we have established our personas and identified how we want our users to experience the new feature, we jumped into Figma to start wireframing.

One of the initial challenges we faced was deciding how to incorporate a way for users to access the option to split bills. We iterated on the most optimal placement of buttons and features until we settled for our final choice.

Old iterations showing how we tried to incorporate a seamless introduction to a bill-split feature

Use Cases

A key feature that we were tasked with was building out a recurring bill splitting as a means to incentivize continual use of Cash App.

4 - Bill Splitting Apps - Invite friends.png

Deliver

Final Product

With the rise in digital currency management, the demand for extra security has also increased. In order to protect against hackers, fraudulent transactions, and theft we designed a two-factor authentication process for Cash App users. This will help protect current and future users from account attacks.

Prototype

Key Insights

Convenience & Safety

Through our survey we learned that users wanted a bill splitting feature that is convenient and easy to divide costs of bills–especially between big groups. Competitors such as Zelle and Venmo are vastly used by the majority rather than Cash App. We found that people are worried about the safety of Cash App.

Users like that Cash App doesn't charge monthly fees, fees to send or receive money, inactivity fees, or foreign transaction fees. However, they would like to have convenient bill splitting and increased safety, possibly by way of 2FA.

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