Stari

Framing the Problem

In the UK, about 6 in 10 people eat at restaurants or cafes. However, splitting bills is typically an awkward and sometimes stressful experience, with many people resorting to calculators to figure out how much each person owes.

Starling's challenge presents a unique opportunity to gamify the process of splitting bills, with the idea of creating an innovative approach to tracking contributions and enjoying meals out with friends.

Idea Explanation

Our app is called Stari, a mobile application that incorporates the element of speed and looking after a pet, to splitting bills. Stari is your friendly advocate that helps you navigate splitting bills as well as encouraging you to pay your portion in good timing.

Key features:

• Scan a receipt and set a timer for your friends to pay their bill

• Race against time to pay your portion of the bill

• The faster you pay, the more coins you earn!

• These coins can be used to customise Stari and gain cashback on future group events

• Compete on a leaderboard to see which friend pays the quickest

Implementation

• The app would be built with Flutter, leveraging OCR to read receipts. Flutter allows us to build for iOS and Android with one codebase.

• The backend, yet to be implemented, would be a Node.JS server with MongoDB.

Challenges

The big challenge was identifying the best way to convey this idea.

• Initially we thought of building an app during the timeframe, showing the scanning of a receipt functionality as well as showing how the timer would work.

  • However, we felt that a built app wouldn't convey more about the functionality that couldn't be explained through a Figma demonstration and a slide deck.

  • It felt somewhat counter-intuitive to make the decision not to code, especially as we all had coding experience, but given the short-timeframe, it meant that we could focus more on having a strong design and making sure our idea was relatively concrete.

Accomplishments

• Sophie and Demi worked on the Figma designs for the app, keeping a consistent design colour scheme and making sure it was as intuitive as possible.

• We wanted the app to be easy to use without looking too cluttered, like many banking apps look like. Sophie also generated the mascot for the app, Stari, using Google Gemini.

• Khushbu and Mariam worked on the slide deck for the app and helped with refining the idea further.

  • We developed a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats), and compared our idea against existing solutions.

  • This helped us find gaps that we could leverage, as well as taking principles that work well for other applications (Duolingo) and applying them into our application.

Next Steps

Next steps would involve building this idea further as a bespoke mobile application. The idea would work better as a solution inbuilt to Starling, rather than as a separate app, as studies show that individuals spend 80% of their time on the same 5 applications.

It would be beneficial to include functionality that helps with splitting bills in other domains, particularly holiday travel where one person in the group has to pay for the hotel etc.