Fairshare.
UX/UI - Case Study
Fubruary 2024 - May 2024
Role:
UX/UI Designer, Graphic Designer, Researcher, Motion Graphics
Brief:
Fairshare is a mobile expense tracker designed to simplify managing group expenses in various settings like sales teams, friend groups, or households. The app allows users to easily track and divide expenses, featuring receipt scanning for quick capture and categorization. It also offers expense splitting to divide costs evenly or based on custom shares, making it ideal for managing shared expenses. Fairshare streamlines the process of tracking and settling group finances, eliminating redundant tasks and providing an efficient, user-friendly alternative.
The Problem
Managing expenses—whether in businesses, households, or social settings—can be complex and prone to errors. Employees often struggle with staying within budget while tracking costs, misplacing receipts, or forgetting small purchases. Shared expenses can lead to confusion, delays, and added administrative work. Company cards add another layer of complexity, making it harder to track individual spending, especially if employees use them for personal expenses or forget to log purchases. At home, shared costs like bills and groceries can quickly become overwhelming, leading to disagreements about who owes what. Similarly, when friends travel together or share meals, dividing expenses becomes a frustrating task.
The Solution
Fairshare is a user-friendly platform for managing and splitting group expenses, ideal for businesses, households, or friends. It enables easy cost division and payment through bill splitting and built-in money transfers. The app automatically categorizes expenses with receipt scanning, and integration with bank accounts and cards ensures seamless tracking across all accounts. Fairshare also organizes expenses by category, allowing users to review purchases easily. It combines personal and group expense tracking in one place, while offering insights into spending habits for better financial decisions.
Competitive Analysis
FairShare competes in the expense-tracking market alongside platforms like Mint, Ramp, GoodBudget, and Splitwise. Analyzing these competitors revealed common shortcomings, such as overly complex interfaces, a focus on manual tracking, and a lack of key integrations. Many platforms struggle to strike the right balance between automation and user-friendliness, while others fail to provide robust group management tools. FairShare addresses these gaps by combining automated expense tracking with seamless group management in a simple, intuitive platform. Its modern UI, bank syncing, and easy group payment features provide a more streamlined and transparent solution for collaborative expense tracking.
User Research
User research for FairShare uncovered key insights into users' financial habits and challenges. Respondents were between the ages of 19 and 37, with incomes ranging from under $25,000 to over $150,000. The majority were employed full-time, while others were students, part-time workers, or self-employed. A significant portion of users did not track their expenses at all, and many others relied on inefficient methods like banking apps or spreadsheets. Common pain points included the lack of automation in expense tracking, difficulty managing shared costs, and the manual input required in current tools. Users expressed frustration with inconsistent expense categorization and desired clearer insights into their spending. Many also sought features like budgeting tools, goal setting, and receipt scanning to streamline their financial management. By offering automated categorization, bill splitting, and easy-to-use budgeting features, FairShare addresses the challenges identified in the research and provides a more efficient solution.
User Personas
To ensure FairShare effectively meets user needs, we developed two key personas based on insights from user research, surveys, and personal experience. The survey revealed common financial challenges, such as difficulty tracking fluctuating expenses, managing shared costs, and the desire for automation and clearer spending insights. By identifying recurring pain points, such as the frustration with manual tracking and inconsistent categorization, we were able to identify key patterns that informed the personas. These profiles reflect the diverse needs of users, ranging from young professionals managing fluctuating income to more experienced users seeking streamlined financial tools. This process allowed us to design FairShare’s features, such as automated categorization, bill splitting, and budgeting tools, to address the specific challenges and goals of our target users.
Architecture
Understanding that expense tracking can be a daunting task, FairShare’s design process focused on creating an intuitive, user-friendly experience to simplify expense tracking. The process began with a competitive analysis, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of existing platforms. Insights from this analysis, combined with user research, helped identify pain points such as information overload, lack of automation, and inefficient navigation. These findings led to the prioritization of key features, including clear visualizations of spending habits and seamless bill splitting. Wireframes and prototypes were developed with a focus on readability, utilizing large headers, graphs, and simplified navigation to enhance usability. Close collaboration with developers ensured that each feature was feasible and aligned with the overall vision. Early testing provided valuable feedback, prompting refinements such as streamlining the transaction list and improving button placements. Ongoing iterations and user feedback throughout the development process allowed for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to an app that strikes the right balance between simplicity and functionality, addressing the core needs of its users.
Onboarding users to get ready to manage their expenses
Three of Fairshares main screens, the home page, account view, and card view
The groups page, budgeting page, and notifications page
Key Features
1
Smart Receipt Scanning & Itemizing
Easily scan receipts using the app’s built-in scanner, which automatically extracts and categorizes items. This eliminates manual entry, ensuring accurate expense tracking and seamless organization of shared purchases.
2
Advanced Expense Splitting
Split expenses effortlessly with flexible options, including equal division, percentage-based, and custom amounts. Users can assign specific items to individuals, reducing the hassle of calculating who owes what.
3
Collaborative Expense Management & Budgeting
Track group expenses in real time, set shared budgets, and monitor spending trends. Whether for households, trips, or business teams, this feature keeps financial contributions transparent and organized.
Branding
1
Working closely with a team of developers gave me valuable experience in bridging the gap between design and development. It reinforced the importance of clear communication, alignment between teams, and strong collaboration to bring a shared vision to life.
2
Gathering feedback from real nurses was instrumental, helping identify pain points and usability challenges, as well as giving ideas for app features, allowing us to adapt the design for a more intuitive and effective experience. This process reinforced the value of continuous testing and iteration to ensure the app truly meets user needs.
3
Striking a balance between a clean, user-friendly interface and the need to accommodate multiple, intricate inputs required careful problem-solving. It highlighted the importance of intuitive UX design, prioritization, and iterative testing to ensure usability without sacrificing functionality.
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