Beloved Billing App
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Keeping track of routine bills (electric bill, the water bill, the gas bill and so on) has always been a tedious task. This app will break the billing cycle by generating a fixed monthly payment for all your bills together. Any leftover money from the fixed payment is saved up to fulfil a predefined goal, such as a trip to Thailand, for instance.
The Problem
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Staying on top of your bills is a hassle. Each service provider has its own billing cycle; weekly, monthly, bimonthly, annual, etc.). Some bills are printed and arrive in the mail, others are sent by email.
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Organising bills takes a lot of time. They occupy a lot of space and it takes tons of time to keep them in order. In fact, in a survey I conducted on an audience between the ages 18 to 32; Some 64% of the participants admitted not to keep their bills filed in any order at all.
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Understanding the big picture is practically impossible when bills arrive on different dates and charge for different periods of service.
My Role
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This was a fun project I worked on in a quick 24-hour hackathon. The team consisted of 3 engineers, and 2 designers (myself included).​ I ideated with the team and worked on the design into the night with my colleague designer.
Product Ideation
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We conducted several brainstorming sessions, while encouraging each team member to bring as many materials, content and visuals as possible so we could start landing our idea with research.
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Finally, the Eureka moment!
Normalizing all bills to a daily resolution would neutralize billing cycles, thus relieving the users from the horrid task of following and handling bills.
How Research Influenced The Design
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Research was conducted on-the-fly during the 24-hour hackathon by each team member:
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- We found that millennials in particular we experiencing more pain than other generations...
So we designed a mobile one-stop-shop for all their routine billing issues. We also designed and personalised promotions based on user expense patterns.
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- We realised that millennials would need a lot of motivation to download a billing app...
So we added the "Dream" feature, which works quite simply: any leftover money from the daily budget would be saved up for a user-predefined dream, such as taking a summer vacation, buying a car or saving up for a wedding.
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- We came across many apps that display a unified view of all bills but none automise paying...
We distinguished ourselves from the competition by focusing on the user's dreams instead of the bills themselves.
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- We realised that most of our users would be home renters...
So we strengthened it by adding the "Split Bill With Others" feature for roommates.
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- We discovered that home owners might see it as a seal of approval for potential renters​...
so we generated the single monthly charge to ensure that bills would never be overdue again.
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Use Case:
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Noah, who dreams of a vacation in Thailand, wants to make sure his share of the gas bill is on track, while the remainder belongs to his roommates Alicia and Daniel.
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What I Learned
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The hackathon was filled with all sorts of mentors; from business and marketing to artificial intelligence and feasibility guides; I soaked up a lot of information from different aspects of the tech industry. Also, I developed some pretty nifty data visualisation skills during this project.
More projects I was involved in:
