Product Breakdown: 3 Learnings from the Splitwise app

Product Breakdown analyzes a different product every week, and takes note of interesting product and UX learnings. We believe that the best way to master good product practices is to learn from others.

Intro

Splitwise is an app designed to help you “split expenses with friends”. For example, you can keep a running ledger of shared expenses with your roommate, or keep track of group expenses when you go on a trip with your friends. Then, at the end of the month, or at the end of the trip, the app can consolidate expenses, and tell you who owes whom and how much. Here are some interesting product takeaways from tearing down the iOS and Android apps.

1. Filter View (on iOS) is easier to parse than Tabbed View (on Android)

The Android landing page for the Splitwise app is older, and different, from the iOS one. Take a look at two landing experiences.

In the Android app, tabs at the top allow you to switch between 3 different pages/views: “total”, “you owe”, and “you are owed”, each with the relevant transactions.

In the Android app, “Total Balance”, “You Owe”, and “You are Owed” are 3 separate pages

The iOS app on the other hand, presents the “total”, “you owe”, and “you are owed” as filters on a single list of all transactions. This makes the app feel simpler than the Android counterpart, and prevents you from having to mentally parse what the 3 different tabs are.

In the iOS app, “You Owe”, “You are Owed”, and “Total Balance” are filters of the same view

2. Avoid Duplicative Navigation

Having more ways to do the same thing can make an app feel unnecessarily complex. The Android app lists every single friend in both the landing feed, and the left nav. Unfortunately, this causes the nav to feel long and overwhelming.

The Android app lists every single friend twice — on the landing page, and in the nav. Not only is this not necessary, but this makes the nav long and cumbersome.

3. Using fake options to drive home use cases

When you create a group in Splitwise, the app asks you to select the type of the group: Apartment, House, Trip, or Other.

Selecting “Apartment”, “House”, “Trip”, or “Other” makes no difference to the group functionality.

This choice is fairly useless: the functionality of each type of group is identical. (In fact, the Android app doesn’t even remember the type selection).

Why is Splitwise asking you to select the type of group then? One reason could be to remind and encourage users to use Splitwise in these common ways. These use cases make sense too — Apartment/House focuses on user retention (I’m likely to keep using Splitwise with my roommates till my lease ends), and Trip focuses on virality (in any trip with lots of people, there’s a high chance I’ll add a person to the group who’s never used Splitwise).

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