Designing a concept nobody had seen before.
SplitPay had no reference pattern to borrow. Every screen had to do double duty: teach an unfamiliar idea and survive the messy reality of a billing system. Here is the path a customer actually walks.
Getting found inside My Billing Center
The best enrollment flow is worthless if nobody trips over it. I gave SplitPay two homes on the billing hub: a conditional “Did you know? You can Split your bill” banner, and a permanent Split the bill row inside Manage Settings ending in Signup.
The rule behind it was the real design decision: the banner only renders if the account is eligible, and disappears for good once a split group exists — so the page never nags someone who already said yes.
Why this screen carries the business case: enrollment fell 40% when an awareness card was removed from this page, and a later placement test lifted enrollment +105%.
Earning a permanent place in the account menu
This is the enrolled state on mobile, and it shows where SplitPay ends up once it stops being a new feature and becomes part of how someone runs their account.
Open the balance card's overflow menu and Check SplitPay status sits first — above Set-up AutoPay and Manage payment method. Winning that slot mattered more than any banner: it puts SplitPay alongside the two controls people already trust and return to.
On a phone the hub becomes one long scroll, so the deeper Manage Settings entry sits far below the fold. A persistent shortcut at the top is the difference between a feature people manage and one they forget they turned on.
Teach first, ask second
Nobody had ever split a carrier bill before, so opening with a form would have meant asking for commitment before comprehension. The flow starts with “Say hello to the new experience” — a short explainer video with a clearly available Skip.
Giving Skip equal prominence was deliberate. Education should be available, not mandatory — forcing a tutorial on a confident user is just one more step to abandon.
Answering “why should I?” at the moment of doubt
This is the decision screen — choosing who pays. Above the list sits a value panel, “Why should you split billing with other users?”, spelling out the payoff: automatic monthly reminders, payers settling their own share through FastPay, and less hassle for everyone.
Below that, the task stays deliberately plain: Who is the primary account in this list? and a simple radio list. Reassurance and task are kept separate so the decision never feels cluttered.
The step we deleted
Stripped of the education panel, the task is just a question and a list. That clarity is what made the project's biggest win possible: for two-line accounts, asking someone to designate a payer is meaningless — there is only one other person.
We removed the step and tested it. Task accomplishment lifted +20.45% and progression to confirmation +22.86%, both at 99.99% confidence. After launch, completion for two-line accounts more than doubled — from 33% to 74%.
The lesson I keep: the highest-performing thing I designed on SplitPay was a screen I took away.
Showing the math before asking for a yes
The review step is where an abstract idea becomes real money. Every payer's share is itemized against Your part and the Current balance, with the full PDF bill one click away. Nobody agrees to split a bill they can't see.
Two consent decisions live here rather than buried in settings. “Set it and forget it!” explains exactly when notifications go out — every month, three days before the due date — and Send payment reminder now lets the account holder kick off the first request immediately.
Because SplitPay texts other people on the customer's behalf, consent had to be explicit and legible. That's a content and legal partnership as much as a design one.
Answering the only question that really matters
The account holder's core anxiety is simple: did everyone actually pay? Payment status answers it in one scan. Outstanding balances sit in neutral dark type; settled shares turn green and read “Paid” — so the exceptions are what your eye lands on, not the successes.
The primary account holder is badged in the list rather than pulled out of it, keeping one consistent ranking while still signalling who owns the account.
A persistent Pay total outstanding balance button anchors the page — a deliberate escape hatch, because the real-world fallback was always “I'll just pay it myself.”
Settings that survive real life
Enrollment is the easy part. People change roommates, swap payers, and leave plans — so Split Pay settings had to make every one of those moves safe and obvious.
Pay for someone handles the most human edge case in the product: a parent covering a kid's line, or one person picking up a share this month. The popover keeps it to a single question — “Who do you want to pay for?”
Two details do the heavy lifting on trust. “All changes made will take effect from the next billing cycle” sets expectations before the change, not after. And the quiet off-ramp lets people leave without hunting, because a payment product earns trust by how cleanly it lets you out.
Screens use placeholder (FPO) content and fictional account data. Additional flows — no-SMS-device handling and the cancellation off-ramp — are available in the full spec on request.