TabSplit was born out of a repeated, highly relatable friction point: college dinners with ten friends where settling the bill turned into a chaotic struggle involving three separate calculators, disputed appetizer shares, and Venmo request math. Existing tools like Splitwise were powerful but suffered from bloated, menu-heavy flows that required setting up groups, logging transactions individually, and manual split calculations.
I wanted to create an alternative that brought physical simplicity to a digital interface. The goal was to build a tool that felt as immediate and tactile as moving cash around a table.
Most bill splitting apps fail because they force users into abstract bookkeeping forms. TabSplit models the physical table itself. The screen is divided into two primary zones: the Center Table (representing shared items, like a shared pitcher of soda or garlic bread) and My Items (representing personal items, like your entree). Below, you can see the original architectural wireframe side-by-side with an interactive sandbox simulating this exact relationship.
Click on user avatars (You, A, B, C) to view their personal tabs. Click on any item card to reassign ownership or split it across the table.
Testing the app in the wild with hungry college groups forced us to rethink several assumptions:
I learned a massive amount from this project. It proved that UI problems cannot be fully solved in a vacuum—they have to be tested against the impatience of hungry people trying to figure out who ordered the extra fries. By embracing multiple rounds of field feedback, TabSplit successfully streamlined group ordering and optimized an inherently messy social interaction.