Dido (dee • doh) is an expense tracker that provides a collaborative and flexible solution for travelers who share expenses with others on group trips.
I improved the user experience, designed the user interface and refined the MVP. The focus was to create a seamless experience so travelers can spend more time enjoying their trip, and save time and energy on calculating shared expenses before, during or after the trip.
The primary goal was to make tracking expenses simple and easy so travelers can enjoy their trips in the moment.
Users can also store images of receipts for later.
Travelers can create trips and invite friends to make collecting shared expenses collaborative and transparent.
Here travelers can add shared expenses and easily split expenses with anyone part of the group.
To make the app as flexible as possible, hosts have four options to add friends and guests to a shared trip hub.
For friends with accounts, there’s an easy search or QR code option. Users can easily invite friends who don’t have an account yet too.
And if they have friends who don’t have a smart device, they can create a guest profile for the account. This also improves the inclusiveness and accessibility of experience!
I sat down and talked to some friends who went on group trips within the past year to learn more about their experiences with shared expenses and budgeting.
After talking to them, I found that there were two types of travelers.
Although their pain points and goals were similar, solving for cash payment travelers would benefit both cash and digital payment travelers.
I synthesized their responses in an affinity map and discovered that they had two main pain points and two goals.
Based on the responses from the user interviews, I came up with a set of design principles to follow:
1. Flexible
The design should make it easy for travelers to make changes as changes happen throughout the trip.
2. Simple
With the everything going on during the trip, a simple design will help users have clarity.
With these principles in mind, it was time to start sketching and wireframing.
After creating the prototype, I tested the app with some friends to tests its usability.
I wanted to test the user interface design, focusing on the three most important user task flows: (1) adding an expense, (2) creating a trip, and (3) sending a payment request from a friend user journeys.
I got great feedback from the participants to incorporate into the final iteration. One participant even noticed a hole in the payment request user journey (thank you 🙏).
Once the MVP is launched, I will track the amount of requests or payments made after the trip has ended. This will show us if the travelers are able to pay or get paid back with the help of the app.
The current focus is on building trust with the users. In order to continue to grow, Dido aims to become a reliable source for its users.
The initial focus was on the cash payment users since the user flow would benefit both cash and digital payment users. Once trust is built with the users, the focus can shift towards the digital payment users.
🌟 I learned the difference between designing for a mobile app versus a responsive mobile screen.
They are very similar in terms of the basic principles such as using the rule of thumb, the size of text, and spacing, but also a little different in the absence of considering a desktop design.
🌟 For usability testing, I learned that I should condense the amount of tasks.
When there are too many tasks, it can be hard to see and keep track of what works and what didn't.
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