Overview

Billy is a mobile application designed to help people to manage their subscriptions efficiently. For this project, I took process of defining, analyzing, ideation, prototyping.

1. Background

Subscription market keeps growing and I've subscribed a lot of services, I found it hard to keep track of my subscriptions. How might I solve this?

2. Research question

How do people manage their subscriptions and payment? What are some problems there?

3. Defining & Research

to understand market and users, I took several research methods.

Quantitative survey

Q: How many services do people subscribe?

  • 0 - 2 (682)
  • 3 - 5 (523)
  • More than 6 (38)

Q: How do they get information of their subscription payment?

  • Checking on their bill (466)
  • Through e-mail or message (285)
  • Go to an official website or app (256)
  • Others (19)

Q: How many people have struggled with unsubscribing?

  • 63% said they have struggled
  • 37% said no

Qualitative interview

I collected over 100 opinions shared from respondents.

"Every time when I need to unsubscribe, I have to figure out where it is. It's annoying and complicated."

"I want to get informed about recurring payment before payment due."

"After free trial, it turns into a recurring payment without telling me. So I had to pay for it, even though I didn't want to use."

"I don't memorize payment due, I often forget to cancel my subscription. I even paid for 6 months fee which I ended up using only once."

"Raising prices pisses me off and they don't tell me about it."

"I use several credit cards, so I often forget which card I use for which subscription."

"When my bank account doesn't have enough balance, it causes payment failure."

"Apple subscription just informed me of charge fee but not what it's about."

Other methods

I used user persona & user journey method to make sure if there are missing pain-points and to verify my result of research. I create two types of user personas. Since according to my survey, most people only have less than 2 subscriptions, they might have relatively less difficulty on managing subscriptions compared to people who have more than 5 subscriptions.

4. Goal

Help people not to spend unnecessary expense on their unwanted subscriptions.

Let people have a smooth experience of canceling subscriptions.

Enable people to easily check information about their subscriptions at a glance.

5. Insight

I analyzed and grouped problems that I found through methods above. And made suggestions based on that.

    Solutions

  1. Push notification before payment due, trial due.
  2. Simplify cancelation steps with a direct button.
  3. Let users know which account or card they linked and how much balance left.
  4. Let users know about change of price.
  5. Show users their subscriptions and information of them at a glance.
  6. Show users comparison of price between services, recommend them alternative services to lower their bill.
  7. Reservation for unsubscribing.

    Value prioritizing

  1. Simplify cancelation steps with a direct link.
  2. Push notification before payment due, trial due.
  3. Show users their subscriptions and information of them at a glance.

6. Ideation

Information Architecture

Wireframes

Sketch

7. Design System

Using Figma tool, I restricted UI colors, font-weight, style for consistency. I created variants from one component another. This keeps whole design consistent as well as helps me effectively manage design components.

8. Prototyping

Onboarding

Quick onboarding. Users can directly use the service without having to sign up or log in.

Customizable

Users can customize their own subscriptions. It prevent user's frustration when they can't find their subscriptions in search.

Detail input

For the details of each subscription, users need to input information. With auto filled system, users don't need to fill all the information. I used wheel picker, toggle for input materials to ease annoyance of manual typing.

Notification

Users can turn on notification and they also can set the timimg of recieving notification.

Calendar & Spending

Users can swap from list to calendar by tapping the segmented controler. Calendar feature can give users more intuitive overview of their subscriptions. Spend feature helps users to check their spending on subscriptions and users can sort breakdown by categories, payment methods, subscriptions.

Easy unsubscribing

As my research suggests, it's revealed that most of respondents have difficulty on unsubscribing. With a button that guide users directly to the link, users don't need to struggle with finding out the page.

Organazing lists

Subscriptions in the list are draggable so that users can re-organize the order of subscriptions. And users can easily remove subscriptions by sliding, which simplify steps of deleting them.

Take away

Compared to my first UX project, Guider, I saved much time designing UI with auto layout tool in Figma. And by creating variants from an original component, I could more effectively manage components and keep consistent. Which resulted in enhancing productivity and lowering time that I spent.

What I need to improve is I shoud do more rapid prototyping and not to be perfect at one time.