Making Splitting the Check a Little More Intuitive
This week’s challenge was to design a calculator. I decided to go with a check calculator!
I’m a big fan of using apps to make it easier to split the check. It saves me a lot of hassle. For the most part, I love the existing apps for this, however, my favorite one has one big flaw for me.
Assigning people to line items is NOT intuitive, and when more than one person had an item, it’s even less intuitive.
The key to this app is that you have to have the person selected BEFORE clicking on a food item. To me, this wasn’t initially intuitive. The people are at the bottom of the screen, and my first instinct was to tap a food item THEN select the appropriate people. It took me a bunch of uses before I could come to the app and know how to use it without thinking.
This is a tricky problem because you either need an intuitive method to select people after selecting a food item, or you need an intuitive method to select a food item after selecting people.
Indicating who’s selected for what is difficult so I decided to go with a classic drag-and-drop approach so users can think about it however they like. They can either drag one person to each food item they had, or they can drag each person to a specific food item then move down the list. Order doesn’t matter.
