Owe.to Facebook Application

I created the Owe.to Facebook Application over the weekend to skip the email address verification step (that was required to prevent others from pretending to be you). I can skip it in the Facebook application because Facebook has already verified your email address.

Go to App or check out the Application Profile Page.

You will be asked for the send me email permission when you access the app for the first time. Owe.to requires this permission to access your Facebook verified email address.

Would love to get feedback form you. Please leave a comment below or visit http://oweto.uservoice.com/

Owe.to Update: Group Reminders, Remember Email Verification Status and Sneak Peak of Android App

Here is a quick update on Owe.to:

• Group Reminders: You can now setup reminders for more than one person by simply filling in additional email addresses separated by commas. This is perfect for keeping track of shared expenses like parties and celebrations, going clubbing, group holidays or buying a gift for special events like a friend's birthday, wedding, housewarming or baby shower.
• Remember Email Verification Status: If you are a regular user of Owe.to, then you won't have to verify your email address every time you want to setup a reminder. When you verify your email address by clicking on the link sent in the verification email, it will remember the verification status for your email address and won't ask you for verification for all subsequent requests in the same browser. 

I've tried to implement these without sacrificing the immediacy and simplicity of Owe.to. Hope you like it. To give feedback to improve Owe.to visit: http://oweto.uservoice.com/

Coming soon: My friend Mital is working on an Android app for Owe.to.

Owe.to (my "little" app) featured in The Times of India's Mumbai Mirror

I woke up on Feb 9, 2011, to see a lot of users on Owe.to. Ok, a lot is not really a lot, more like a few hundreds, but it was more than the usual, considering I hadn't announced it anywhere and only showed it to few friends.

Looking at the access logs, I stumbled upon a few requests coming in from the online version of The Times of India's Mumbai Mirror. Turns out that someone at Mumbai Mirror came across Owe.to and featured it on Page 24 (the sci-tech section).

The reason I hadn't announced it yet was because I was still wrapping up the finishing touches on it (lots of small things to do). This forced launch had me scrambling to finish off stuff, but it was also kind of liberating and exciting. Plus I now have a nice pitch for Owe.to thanks to the description in the paper:

Fed up of friends who borrow money and then conveniently forget? A website to send friendly automated email payment reminders to them.

Other places Owe.to has been spoted so far:

• Jared Spool bookmarked my now dated post about Owe.to's design principles alongside Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design, Facebook Design Principles and LukeW's Developing Design Principles:  http://www.delicious.com/jmspool/designprinciples
• Stephen Anderson said "(Owe.to is a) Great example (of a conversational form), thought through in detail"
• Owe.to was featured on a Dutch website in an article about conversational forms: http://www.webanalisten.nl/verbeteren/praktijk-cases/%E2%80%9Cverhaal-formulieren%E2%80%9D-ruim-25-meer-conversie.html

Conversational Applications

One of the principles of Owe.to was that it had to be conversational. This means that instead of the traditional filling-up-a-form experience of web applications, it should feel like you are talking to Owe.to. I first came across this when I saw the Huffduffer sign up page:



This is what I came up with for Owe.to:



Forms that are conversational come with a unique set of issues that you need to deal with to make them usable for the user. For one, they don't have labels, and the user has to figure out what he needs to fill in based on the context. I came up with a way to provide additional context using a sort of dynamic label that I call Callout Labels that appear when the form field receives focus (think this evolved from a tooltip suggestion by Jinesh):



How about help text? The traditional way of displaying help text around the form field was not feasible, so I had to display greyed out help text inside the form field itself that disappears when it receives focus (look at the previous two images). Although this technique is wide spread (for example, in search forms) it hit home in the context of Owe.to when I came across Twitpay:



Another interesting issue is figuring out how to display validation errors. I'm not there yet with Owe.to, but I like how Huffduffer does this:

Owe.to Design Principles

Principles that help guide Owe.to's personality and the experience it provides:

• Indirect: To overcome the awkwardness of asking friends to pay you back, you should not have to address the friend directly.


• Conversational: Instead of the experience of filling up a form, you should feel like you are talking to Owe.to.


• Peace of mind: Telling Owe.to about a friend, should mean that you can forget about it because Owe.to will remember, and repeatedly remind the friend till a resolution is reached.


• Quick and easy: Collect the least possible information from you to reduce the investment required by you to try-out/use the service.


• Terse: Reduce the amount of information you need to process.


• Incremental: Like real people, the personality of Owe.to and the experience it provides, will keep developing (changing/growing/evolving) over time.

Owe.to's story began when I saw a friend of mine asking another friend of ours, to help him collect money from the people he had paid for the previous night clubbing. At that moment, I realized just how awkward it is for some people to ask friends to pay them back. That incident compelled me to start development on Owe.to, a service to remind friends to pay you back, without the awkwardness!