Splitwise App Evaluation

The Splitwise app is a popular household expense splitting app used by thousands of users around the world. While widely popular, the app has a series of negative reviews commenting on it's flow and UI.

A design team of four others and myself set out to discover what these problems were and how we might solve them.

My responsibilities:
Team Lead, Researcher, Principal Designer

Splitwise Heuristic Evaluation

First, our team performed an expert heuristic evaluation using Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics on the Splitwise mobile app. The purpose of our report was to identify key usability issues and come up with recommendations that would make the app understandable and easy to use. We created a scenario consisting of 3 specific tasks: Create an account, create a group, and create an expense to split within that group.

Throughout the course of our evaluation, we identified 21 positives findings, 4 cosmetic issues,

7 minor issues, 5 major issues, and 2 catastrophic issues.

Splitwise Competitive Analysis

Next, our team conducted a competitive analysis to better understand Splitwise's strengths and weaknesses. We compared Splitwise to five of the top finance apps available: Splittr, Acasa, Settle Up, Venmo, and Google Pay; and we identified several market advantages and disadvantages for the app. At the end of our analysis, we identified several design revisions and features that Splitwise could leverage to improve performance.

Splitwise Redesign Recommendations

We decided to redesign the app focusing on improving the user tutorial, adding data visualization, and redesigning the buttons and overall layout of the app. The team designed a number of high-fidelity wireframes to help visualize the potential revisions the team purposed.