Fair & Square

Role: Product Designer • Tools: Figma, Illustrator

Fair & Square is a rental calculator application that considers room sizes and income, helping people split and pay their rent easily.

THE PROBLEM

Rental calculators are not comprehensive enough to cover multiple rooms, who uses them, and how much each tenant makes. Using more exact details will help each tenant feel they are paying their fair share.

THE SOLUTION

Fair & Square helps calculate what everyone owes and helps keep track of rent payments. Income is a factor with the ability to change how much it factors in. Extra rooms like private closets and bathrooms are taken into account.

WHAT ARE THE OTHER APPS DOING?

Splitwise

Easy to split bills and rent with roommates. You can pay through the app. Can only pay equally or by %, doesn’t help split rent based on specific factors. They have a website feature outside of the app that loosely values the rooms based on things like windows, closets, and bathrooms.

Spliddit

Somewhat split rent and bills. The demo feature is excellent; I can see how it works clearly. They have a helpful feature to rate the room's perceived values on sliders; every roommate can order it. Processing took a long time, and no other values like room measurements or income were considered.

goodcalculators.com

Only works on phones. It is widely adopted, especially outside of America. Does not have self-destruct text features. Very easy for people to share and save messages, but it is not ideal for users hoping to maintain secret identities or conversations.

WHAT THIS RESEARCH MEANS FOR US

We want to emulate the ease and widely adopted nature of Splitwise but focus on fair rental splits and developing from there. There is a place for us in the market to enter competitively as a detailed and customizable way to make every tenant feel like they are paying a fair amount.

USER RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

"My roommate and I just guessed a number, but their room is so big and they have their own bathroom."

"I pay less because I've been living in my place much longer than the other roommates"

"My roommate makes double what I make, and their room is much bigger than mine, I'd like to factor in pay just a little bit."

"We use Venmo to pay rent."

"It would be nice to have a small rent reminder and show when a roommate has paid rent."

IDEATION

I was given this sketch by the engineer I am working with. We discussed the essential features to set our app apart in the app store. I strongly felt that having income be a factor would set our app apart as a rental calculator. There were already apps that helped pay rent and split bills.

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WIREFRAMES AND FLOWS

From here, we pivoted features and kept many of the concepts laid out in this sketch. We took out "compare rent" and "find a roommate."

BRANDING AND UI DESIGN

I started fleshing out logo and screen designs in my design process. Here are some screens I created but didn't make it through. I like to design many very different screens and iterate, showing my designs to people and seeing which one they respond best. I had to view the screens on both iPhone and Android; the colors can vary greatly from device to device.