While improving the split bill feature.

Prologue:

It all began when one of my co-workers showed me a UX co-creation challenge held by Jenius, one of the most popular digital banking in Indonesia under BTPN. It allowed UX enthusiasts to collaborate their ideas and designs in order to create their own brand new interactive UI/UX design of the Jenius apps to develop a better users’ engagement through UX.

So, why not give it a try.

Research Strategy

When it all comes to problem-solving, it indeed requires a suitable approach to achieve what might cause a better result. Design thinking has been a-well-known problem-solving methods among designers or early start-up. Not only did the event holder recommend teams to apply such methods but we also felt that it suits well considering it enables us to dig deeper problems and to bring all our ideas on board. This is how we planned on doing it.

Empathize: An art of putting yourself in the users' shoes

Our UX Researcher got her hands and mind involved in approaching and getting as much information as possible from Jenius app’s users through some open interview sessions. Note that the interview was conducted to 15 users who have used the Jenius apps for 7 months to 2 years. We didn’t only take notes on what might be the problem but we also tried very hard to put ourselves in the users’ shoes so we understand the pain. The goal of the interview is to get what might be defined as the pains in users’ daily use.

Defining Problems

After a long information gathering process, we finally sat in front of our computers to hold a design sprint. Our UX Researcher had gathered all of the user stories right before the meeting started. So, the next step is to discuss what matters and what doesn’t.

It’s time to eliminate similar stories.

Most of the interviewees said similar concern about the apps, which is :

That Jenius app was kind of confusing because it has too many features that I might haven’t acknowledged and used in my daily life.

We have validated that 15 users said that they hadn’t had any chance to explore another Jenius apps’ features such as loan and saving features. The concern might come due to the extra effort they had to do to explore the features by expanding the burger navigation bar — which makes most of the features hardly visible for users.

Users have to effortfully touch on the burger navbar to explore all the features

The second concern that we got from the users was that the Split bill feature didn’t work optimally. Our assumptions would be the experience might not come from a real-life case. We acknowledge that when people split their bills, the item that they charge to pay is the item that they order. Instead, Jenius provides a manually-input form that enables users to input the bill of their own. Therefore, it causes users to manually count their order which is an extra effort for them to use. They might rather count manually and use their calculator. 



Splitting bill experience concern

Users considered that splitting bill has been their daily transaction so that it will be kind of helpful for the users if they can effortlessly count and split on how much they are charged.

The next step is to put the users’ concerns we’d like to get in this research to the board. Here are the user stories and real problems that we have defined together in a team discussion.

User stories and Real problems boardIdeate Solutions

There are at least 2 main issues that we’re trying to solve in this case. The first one would be the ineffectiveness of the features of information delivery and split bill experience.

The next step was to define How Might We notes. We defined what we could do to deliver a better user experience based on the solutions we also had defined.

We argued if burger navigation has been a problem for hiding the useful features Jenius app has. As all you can see, we are unable to see due to the hidden features in the burger navigation bar itself. Therefore we considered that every time users launch the app, they must be able to see other superior features on the homepage.

Besides the first issue, we decided to make an experience where users can effortlessly count the bill just by taking pictures of it. So that the app will do the rest. The users only need to tag who orders what.

Here are the solutions and how might we note we defined.



Solutions and How might we notes board

Prototypes

Wireframe:I translated How Might We notes into a visual design solution to deliver an informative and reasonable justification into it. So we always know why we decided to go this way.

Here’s the hard sketch wireframe for the first issue:



And here’s the hard sketch wireframe for the second one:



Design:After the debate and discussion on the design and we agreed on the experience implementation, then it’s time for Randy to let his magic work. The design was done in Figma.

Here are the results of the design that we proposed.



A new Jenius home feed design


A new Jenius split bill designValidation:

In order to validate our ideas, we went to test the design by coming to the users and see their reaction so we could get feedback. We used Maze to help us gather accurate user feedback. We’re so happy about this app because it’s so helpful to be able to integrate with Figma.

There are two scenarios that we went through on each different design we proposed. This is how we validated.

Testing on how users feel to explore features in Jenius new home feed
The usability-test was conducted on 11 active Jenius users who have been using Jenius for the same amount of time.

There are several steps that users went through. First, we showed them a current Jenius home feed and empathized with how they felt about exploring Jenius features. Then we showed them the new home feed design and asked how they felt about it. Especially how it affects their engagement in order to explore the features better.

The insight was that most of them would tap on the burger navigation bar and see what’s on Jenius. It proves that the current Jenius home feed is unable to show a piece of whole information about what Jenius really has as features.



How users mostly tap on the burger navigation bar to find the features.This is how users feel about how they explore Jenius features on the current apps.



It doesn’t mean that the current Jenius home feed delivers a bad user experience. The statistic proves that 40% of users have no concerns about the features being shown that way.

But then, this is what the users feel about exploring features on the new Jenius home feed.



Surprisingly, the new design has significant improvement. Users feel that showing most of the features on the home feed has increased their awareness through such features.

The feedbacks also say it all.

“Dengan tampilan baru saya lebih mudah menemukan fitur2 yang ada di Jenius karena diletakkan di bagian depan. Selain itu menurut saya, tampilan yang baru lebih menarik dan lebih informatif.”

"Lebih kekinian, lebih keliatan kalau fiturnya banyak.”

"Mudah karna semua menu utama langsung ditampilkan.”

"Tampilan yg pake icon untuk setiap fiturnya lebih memudahkan dibandingkan yg sebelumnya (scrolling).”

"Menu sudah mudah didapat dengan langsung tapi warnanya yg sama disetiap menu / fitur bikin bingung.”In case you’d like to see how the whole testing was summarized, you may check it here.

How about the split bill feature? Yup, we went to validate it as well.

The test was conducted with 14 Jenius users who have used the split bill feature.



Success Analysis: 92.9 % the majority of the testers completed the mission via an expected path which is looking good.The test was as simple as asking them how they feel about the new design of it. Most of the users found it easier and were able to finish the journey easily.

Then, they gave value to the design. Here’s how they feel about using the new design of the split bill.



A usability test score of the new Jenius split bill featureWe can see that 44% of users feel that it’s easier for them to use the new split bill design. Though users could do it effortlessly, with the result, we believe that we still could improve a better experience design of this feature.

In case you’d like to see how the whole testing was summarized, you may check it here.

Conclusion

The final prototype has a lot to possibly improve in many ways but it’s a good way to go so far. We have also a lot to gain from the case study and it was a great learning experience. We hope to continue to grow in product design, especially in implementing design thinking in our work life. Special thanks to Randy Varianda who collaborates with me in conducting user interface design and user tests as a team in this case study.



Hello, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy reading the whole UX research process we did in this case. We discovered meaningful insights that might be very useful in future projects.

Say hello to me at eckyalimansyah@gmail.com and rvarianda@gmail.com.