2026
Role:
Product Designer
Team:
1 Product Designer
Timeline:
One Week
Skills:
UX Research & Design
Prototyping & UX Writing
Overview
Friends split bills. Colleagues contribute to events. Families pool money for celebrations and trips. But once multiple people are involved, someone has to calculate each share, track payments, send account details, and follow up with anyone who hasn’t paid.
For my Kobo design assessment, I explored how to remove that coordination from the group without making shared payments feel impersonal.
I designed Split, an expense feature within Kobo that lets users create shared expenses, invite participants, calculate contributions, collect payments, track progress, and send considerate reminders.
The idea was simple: money between people is social, not just transactional. Every part of the experience was designed around that principle.
The Problem
When a group shares an expense, one person often becomes responsible for everything that happens after the decision to split it.
They calculate what everyone owes, share payment details, track contributions, and follow up with anyone who has not paid.
A typical expense can quickly move between:
The organiser is left holding the expense together across multiple tools.
This creates two connected problems.
Coordination: There is no single place to create the expense, assign contributions, collect payments, and see what remains outstanding.
Communication: Getting people to pay requires repeated messages and reminders. A simple financial task can quickly become a series of personal conversations.
Research
I combined secondary research with behavioural observation to understand how people coordinate shared expenses, request money, and keep track of contributions. A consistent pattern emerged: the major challenge was coordinating people.
Research revealed two principles that shaped the experience: organisers need complete visibility to manage a shared expense, while participants only need visibility into their own contribution, and reminders should make payment follow-ups easier without creating unnecessary social friction.
The Opportunity
The opportunity was to bring the coordination, visibility, and collection of shared expenses into the same experience, taking the work of keeping everyone aligned out of scattered conversations and tools.
Competitive Landscape
After designing the core flows, I revisited products that approach shared money from different directions. Each solves a different part of the experience, from peer-to-peer payments to expense tracking, but they draw the product boundary in different places.
Across the three products, I found that payments, tracking, and communication are handled as separate parts of the experience, leaving users to move between tools to calculate contributions, settle balances, and follow up on outstanding payments. This reinforced the direction for Split: make the shared expense the centre of the experience, bringing expense creation, contribution assignment, payment collection, progress tracking, and follow-up into one flow.
Users' pain points
Shared expenses create different pressures for the person organising the payment and the people contributing to it. The organiser needs to know who owes what, who has paid, and who still needs a reminder. Participants need a clear view of their contribution, a straightforward way to pay, and room to make partial payments when necessary.
The Solution
I designed Split as a dedicated space within Kobo for creating, managing, and settling group expenses.
A host creates the expense, sets the amount, selects participants, and sends invitations. Kobo calculates each person’s share, with the option
to adjust contributions for uneven splits.
Participants can view and pay their share through Kobo Wallet, debit card, bank transfer, or USSD. The host can track payments, including partial and outstanding contributions, from one place. When payments are overdue, the host can send a reminder generated from the payment status, removing the need to write another message.
The flow keeps the expense, payments, progress, and communication
together, giving both the organiser and participants a clear view of what
is owed and what has been paid.
Core flows
Share a link with
anyone not on Kobo.
Share an invite link so participants can
create a Kobo account and join the expense.
Stay on top of
every contribution.
Monitor payment progress and follow up
with participants through WhatsApp or SMS.
Stay informed as
payments come in.
Receive updates whenever someone pays,
accepts an invitation, or completes their contribution.
Design Decisions
Each decision balanced the financial task with the relationship between the people involved.
Equal split by default
Kobo calculates equal contributions as soon as participants are added, with the option to adjust individual amounts.
AI-generated reminders
Hosts can generate, preview, and send
reminders without writing each message
from scratch.
Give participants context
before they join.
Wallet-first payment
Kobo Wallet is the recommended payment
method, with the rest as alternatives.
What I learned
I began the project thinking shared expenses were primarily a payment problem. As I explored how people organise, contribute, and follow up on group expenses, it became clear that the greater challenge was coordinating people.
That shift shaped every design decision, from payment visibility to reminder design, and reinforced a simple principle: products that handle shared money should support the relationships behind the transaction as carefully as they support the transaction itself.
Designed with love by Tolu