Bills Calendar
A comprehensive overview of monthly recurring expenses that helps users challenge and justify their subscriptions.
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Goal
Design and test a lo-fi addition to the Google Pay app that provides users with in-depth context of their recurring expenses for greater mindfulness of their value and enabling better-informed subscriptions.
My Role
I was on one of three sub-teams. Mine worked on the bills calendar. I contributed as a UX Strategist, Product Designer, UX Researcher, User Tester, and Interaction Designer.

I also led the entire team of 15 people by giving feedback on the other teams' work, scheduling team meetings, interfacing with Google, interfacing with the professors, and presenting our work.
Working with Google
I had a ton of fun working for and with the Google team. We had four checkpoints and they were impressed each time with our progress. The Google team always had constructive input and made us feel like Googlers ourselves!

User Research

We interviewed 24 people in under-represented communities to understand how they use finances. We took 1,330 data points and affinitized them into 129 themes with 4 key areas. We then user tested with an additional 24 people in two rounds to understand how they would use our feature.
Users characterized their transactions in the following ways:
Categorized based on purpose
Subscribing is more convenient
Giving up ownership to get flexibility
And they wanted to complete these actions:
Prepare for Upcoming Subscriptions
Check Status of Bank Accounts
Cancel Unwanted Subscriptions
We learned about our users and mapped them to four archetypes with two axes
Reasons to Spend
Emotional value of the subscription service
Perceived cost of effectiveness
Convenience
Value of the latest content
Frustrations
Losing track of expenses
Bill anxiety
Convenience
Buyer’s remorse
Reasons to Save
Frugaility
Value of ownership
Diffculty to track
Needs
Assess utility and value
Eliminate unnecessary subscriptions
Convenience
Better plan for their MREs
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User Journey

We wanted our users to challenge and justify their subscriptions to ensure they don't end up with more of them than is fiscally responsible. This is how we envision someone using our feature:
Last month, we signed up for a few different streaming subscriptions: Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+.
One night, as we were watching Squid Game, we got a notification that we might not be able to pay our rent next week.
We started to look for subscriptions that we did not need as urgently.

We remembered the entertainment services we recently subscribed to — let’s see if we can choose to keep only one of those.
As we compared them, we noticed how much each would cost in the long-term — not just every month.
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‍We definitely don’t think that having both Hulu and Netflix are worth over $100 a year.
We stayed with Disney+ since they offer a great catalogue of classic films, the Marvel universe, and the Star Wars franchise.
Now that we have challenged and justified our subscriptions, we are confident about cancelling the less valuable ones.

We did two rounds of testing and refinement with 24 users. Let's take a look at the final lo-fi prototype:

Introducing: The Google Pay
Bills Calendar
Bills Overview
Shows upcoming subscriptions and monthly predicted expenditure
View all your subscriptions in a familiar calendar-based layout
Free trial reminders make sure you don’t forget to cancel on time
Upcoming Expenses
Predict fluctuating utilities based on rates, season, and usage
View by due date to see which charges are next or by category to help see what to cut
Add Subscriptions
Easily add expenses with a familiar calendar-based dialog
Split group subscriptions evenly between all its users
Quickly add suggested bills based on email or text receipts
Insights Breakdown
Reveal a more accurate cost of subscriptions over time
Compare subscription costs to your other categories of spending and your income
Assess how much subscriptions are worth
Bills Calendar
Launch Figma Prototype
A screenshot of the prototype for this project open on Figma

User Testing

We user tested with over 20 people for each concept with the functional prototype above. For the calendar app, we wanted to see how well people responded to the calendar analogy and how useful they found the data analytics we presented to them.
Testing Goals
Insight usefulness
Understanding of calendar
Homepage information
Split expenses
Subscription justification
Golden Nuggets
Okay connecting bank and email for more accurate transaction history.
Found the ability to track and manage free trials was extremely helpful.
Great utility from splitting recurring expenses and payment auto-outreach.
Validation Received
Calendar View
Intuitiveness
Subscription-Adding
Flow
Mindfulness
Increase

I also made some high-fidelity mockups by myself using Google's Material Design 3 (M3) to show what it could look like as a feature in the app.

Bills Overview
Shows upcoming subscriptions and monthly predicted expenditure
View all your subscriptions in a familiar calendar-based layout
Free trial reminders make sure you don’t forget to cancel on time
Manage Subscriptions
Predict fluctuating utilities based on rates, season, and usage
View by due date to see which charges are next or by category to help see what to cut
Easily add expenses with a familiar calendar-based dialog
Split group subscriptions evenly between all its users