Pain Point

In a world where everything is becoming subscription-based, people are becoming increasingly anxious about signing up to monthly services. Based on insight from research, this "subscription anxiety" seems to stems from a lack of visibility and control — users don’t remember what they’ve subscribed to, how much it costs, or how to cancel it. This creates hesitation when considering new subscriptions, even if they’re as low as $5/month.

Validation

Through user interviews, I uncovered a recurring emotional friction: people felt overwhelmed when thinking about their stack of subscriptions. Many admitted they having no idea what they're subscribed to and feel they are probably overspending. Younger adults typically felt anxiety about overspending while older adults feared forgetting about subscriptions while paying for them forever.

In conclusion, research through user interviews revealed uncertainty and lack of transparency a key factor in causing subscription anxiety.

Key user

Two distinct personas emerged with similar pain points:

‍Young adults often juggle multiple subscriptions like streaming, productivity tools, and niche services like gaming. With a more savings oriented mindset, they felt anxiety from accumulating too many recurring costs compounding over time and eating into their savings.

‍Older adults feared being trapped in subscriptions without being aware of them. In addition, older adults tend to be less tech savvy therefore figuring out how to cancel a service felt like a burden. The lack of clarity in what they're subscribed to coupled with friction in cancellation amplified their reluctance to a subscribing to any new services.

Both groups suffered from a lack of transparency and control over their subscriptions.

User Frustrations

• "I don’t even know what I’m paying for anymore."
  

• "I’d cancel, but I don’t know where to do it."
  

• "I don’t want to go through five support tickets just to cancel something I forgot I had."
  

• "Subscriptions feel like quicksand — easy to get into, hard to escape."
  

Principles

To start creating a solution for these frustrations, I came up with the following design principles as a guide:

• Transparency: users should clearly understand their total monthly spendings
  

• Control: cancelling or renewing subscription services should be easy and frictionless
  

• Guided information: users should have insights on which areas of life they're delegating monthly spendings to
  

Solution

Onepay offers a clear and easy system to manage all subscriptions with full control to cancel or renew. Key features:

• Summary overview: All subscriptions combined to one monthly cost at a glance.
  

• Easy control: cancelling or renewing subscriptions is as simple as flipping a switch.
  

• Intuitive categorization: Subscriptions are categorizes into groups (e.g. entertainment, finance, health, etc).
  

• Behaviour nudge: With more insights on monthly spendings, users can be more intentional in choosing the monthly services they truly need.
  

Key Decisions

• Total Spend Overview: The home screen starts with one powerful number - total monthly spendings. This reframes user mindsets from small individual subscriptions (e.g. $5/m) to overall financial impact of multiple subscriptions stacked.
  

• Cancel/Renew toggle: If users need to cut down on subscriptions, they can do so with a simple toggle without going through each service's specific cancelation flow. OnePay's AI agent system will handle the cancellation flow in the back end to allow cancelation through a toggle on the OnePay.
  

• Categories with customizations: OnePay can automatically categorize subscriptions into intuitive categories. Alternatively, users have the flexibility to create their own categories to reflect how they think about spendings.
  

• Minimal onboarding: Users can get set up in minutes. Through connecting a credit card, OnePay can automatically detect all recurring payments and categorize them for the user in minutes. Users also have the option to manually add subscriptions if that suits them better.
  

Design Phase

Wireframing

I began with ultra-low-fidelity wireframes to map out the core user flow:

onboarding → adding subscriptions → reviewing spend → editing/canceling. These grey-only, text-based screens allowed me to quickly define structure without any design distractions.

Establishing visual design:‍

Once I had the main flow figured out, I started collection other designs for inspiration.

I looked at many bookmarked designs from X (twitter) and Dribbbles. I accumulated these designs into a mood board and distilled key elements I felt aligned with OnePay's brand: calm, clear, playful, confident.

High fidelity design:‍

I tackled designing the most complex screen from the app, the home screen. Focusing on font, colours, container details, shadows, and overall visual feel.

Once I felt happy with the home screen, I extracted an early visual design system which was used to design the rest of the screens for onboarding.

Prototype‍

With the screen designs finished, I started linking the flow of the screens on Figma.

During prototyping, I created a few more screens I realized were needed while linking the app screens together. These were extra settings such as editing subscription categories or deleting subscriptions entirely.

Once completed, I spent some time working on the prototype transition animations.

Final Design

Results & Conclusion

User testing with my key users revealed emotional impacts of OnePay's core concept:

• Feeling relief: Testers felt a sense of relief from having all the subscriptions under one number. Some felt the number wasn't as big as they originally thought.
  

• Appreciating more control: Testers loved how easily subscriptions can be toggle off. Even if they didn't want to cancel any subcriptions, they appreciated the easy option being these just in case.
  

• categorization insightful: Some testers were surprised how much they spent on entertainment. They found the categorizations insightful in uncovering which areas of life they're prioritizing with their spendings.