Venmo
Venmo is a popular mobile payment service owned by PayPal. Venmo Users can transfer and receive money from/to others via a mobile phone app.
Team
Yirang Choe, Natalie Yeh, Monikka Ravichandran
Project Duration
October 2018 - December 2018 (3 months)
My Role
User research, UI Design
Project Type
Class Project
Send money and make purchases at approved merchants
Venmo is a digital wallet that lets users send money and make purchases from approved merchants. Venmo has ingrained itself in our lives to a point that it has led to brand verbification. “I will Venmo you”, “I Venmoed the July rent”. People use Venmo regularly to send and request money, and split and pay bills among friends, and these financial activities could all be done inside the app. Venmo is truly becoming a go-to, indispensable digital platform for managing our day-to-day finances.
As power users of Venmo, I, along with two of my colleagues, posed a question to ourselves: "Venmo does its job fine today, but could it get better at it? How could Venmo deliver a more superior and seamless in-app experience to its current and future users?" This very question led us to take a deep-dive into Venmo, from analyzing its current user experience to ideating creative ways to improve its platform through strategic design enhancement.
Objectives
Project Focus
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Study user concerns, analyze feedback, and recommend improved design solutions
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Research, ideate, and propose ways to attract new users and boost app usage with improved UX
Interview Focus
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When, where, and how do users access Venmo?
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What core tasks are they trying to accomplish?
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How quickly could they accomplish their goals?
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What are their happy moments and/or pain points when using Venmo?
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Do they use the app for social reasons at all?
Project Process
Background Research
Contextual Inquiry
Modelling & Affinity Diagram
Ideation & Visioning
Product Concept
Background Research Findings*
*The findings above are not exhaustive, abridged to illustrate key research areas
Contextual Interviews
We interviewed 10 participants comprised of adults from ages 20 to 39 from various educational and occupational backgrounds. All users use the Venmo mobile app. (3 Android and 7 iOS)
Key Findings
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Findings highlight a shift towards cashless mobile wallets
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Adoption of Venmo is strong across all generations
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Time savings and peer influences top the list of motivations
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Users are mostly positive about their Venmo experience but have indicated few areas of improvement
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Users state ease of use and convenience as the primary reasons for using Venmo
Design Ideation Preparations
We collected a total of 358 interview notes for an Affinity Diagram and built three models during back-to-back interpretation sessions: Day In the Life Model, Sequence Model, and Artifact Model. These models were constructed to help us better synthesize, visualize, and communicate the interview findings with external stakeholders.
*Process photo of building affinity diagram
Click to Explore Our Affinity Diagram and Models
Affinity Diagram
DIL Model
Sequence Model
Artifact Model
User Needs & Design Ideas
7 of 10 users :
"I wish Venmo's home page to be more engaging"
Representative Users
4 of 10 users :
"I want fewer steps and shortcuts to accomplish my tasks"
Representative Users
Improvements on search results
-Display friends whom the user recently AND frequently transacts with at the top of the list
Most-used features made obvious
-Hamburger menu revamped
-Redesign icons
Our Team
Representative Users
Our Team
Improvements on transaction feed
-Allow images/GIFs to be posted
-Add “filter" for transactions by category (i.e., Food, Rent, Gift, etc)
Our Team
4 of 10 users :
"I want to see meaningful results that relate to me when searching for people"
Visioning
Turning the idea into concrete, user-first storytelling
We focused our design effort on four primary app screens/use cases reflecting the consolidated user data and design ideas from the previous step. The Visioning was a useful exercise for us in understanding the overall composition of the app as well as creating low-fidelity wireframes for the final product.
*Visioning on Filter/Search Transaction Feed
*Visioning on Pay/Request Process
*Visioning on Notification Feature
*Visioning on Searching Friends
Final Products
Before
@Asthastha
@Bydskf
@Hyoso
@Idk
@AllIWantis
@Joband
@Money
@Hopeyou
@Seethis
Monika Lee
@MoniLee
After
Home Page
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Users can switch the transaction feed by clicking on the icon at the top center of the page ('Public', 'Friends', and 'Private'). The transaction page is set to default in 'Friends-only' view, and these icons disappear when users scroll down the page in order to give users a full view of the feed.
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We de-listed what users considered "most critical and used" features from the hamburger menu and placed them on the homepage to allow them to navigate to those key features more quickly. They include Home Page, Search People, Notifications, and Incomplete.
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Users can upload images or Gifs to make their feed more entertaining and fun to share with others.
My Friends Page
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We developed a new screen in the app where the users could create, organize, and manage the personalized group.
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Users have the option to rearrange the order in which their friends are displayed in the list. These two new features are designed to improve the findability of users' contacts, thus enhancing their overall search experience.
Search Page
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We added a new feature on the search page where users could create and customize their own group of friends.
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The list of friends is displayed alphabetically by name by default, but users could go to "my friends" page to rearrange the order based on their preference.
Pay/Request
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The flow of Pay and Request page was revised as we learned that some users want to deal with pay and request options first before moving on to the next step.
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In addition, we added the transaction category menu and images and Gif upload to the pay/request page.
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Based on the users' complaints about icon size being too small and not wanting to make an extra click for changing the privacy setting, we removed the privacy drop-down function and placed three privacy icons (Public, Friends, and Private) directly on the Pay/Request screen.
Filter for Name, User ID and Transaction Category
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This new feature allows users to retrieve information related to transaction history in a more efficient manner using filters. Based on general observations and conversations with interviewees, we developed 12 different categories that represent the majority of reasons for financial transactions. Users could both search for a transaction history of their particular Venmo friend OR their entire Friends List.
Next Steps
Our critical, immediate next step is to conduct multiple A/B and usability tests in order to iterate our prototypes. During the iterations, we aim to continue to understand and identify current inefficiencies with the design. At the end, we are going to finalize our mockups.