Overview
Since 2009, Venmo has been the app for fast, safe, social payments between friends. It’s the app where settling up feels like catching up, and where money enhances friendships rather than complicating them. Venmo is aimed at friends and family who wish to split bills, e.g. for movies, dinner, rent, or event tickets. Users can transfer funds to others via a mobile phone app. On Venmo, a little social network, users can observe how others who are sending money to one another interact with amusing emoticons.
Problem
The Venmo feed page is getting a little bit stale. People have seen emojis and bitmoji’s for years and the stickers currently in Venmo only offer so much. The feed needs a way to re-engage users as well as offer a practical and extremely useful tool that users will be excited to try out.
Goal
Create a new feature that is both a useful new tool and promotes the social media aspect of Venmo, a staple of the App.
Duration
4 Weeks
80 Hours
Roles
UI/UX Designer
UX Reseracher
Deliverables
MVP
Prototype
Industry
Finance
Social Media
Photo-Snap Uses
Utility
Small businesses can promote their products using Photo-Snap to share product photos and keep a sales record.
Ex: The vintage store Vintage Vibe utilizes the Photo-Snap tool to have a feed that shows off their products, and also serves as a visual sales record.
Socially
Friends out for a meal or enjoying an event can take a Photo-Snap in conjunction with their payment. Your friends can see this on their feed, check what you’re up to, like, and comment.
Ex: Grace took a pic of the meal she had with a friend, and later used it as the request photo in her transaction. After completion, a friend sees the photo and comments to ask where it is from.
Clarity
Requesting people for split bills, groceries, or events can be complex. Adding a photo and using the editing features to highlight allow clarity and accurate reminders.
Ex: The user needs to request their roommate Esther for some food they got for her at Trader Joe’s. They added the receipt and highlighted all her items in the edit function.
Project Timeline
Similarly to most UX projects, the design process is never simply linear. My design process features multiple areas for revision, iteration, and improvement along the entire process.
Research
User Interviews - Competitor Analysis - Persona Creation
Key Interview Findings
5/5 users could see themselves utilizing the Photo-Snap feature
3/5 users use Venmo for utilities or rent, and 5/5 users use Venmo for splitting events, meals, and joint purchases.
Users do not frequently scroll their Venmo Feeds, but will occasionally when already using the app for transactional purposes.
User’s frequency of using Venmo is consistently weekly to bi-weekly
5/5 Users found their current Venmo feed to be stale, boring, or not very interesting.
User Interviews
5 ideal users (Frequent Venmo Users) were interviewed about their usage of Venmo, how they interact with their feed, and and introduction to the new feature. Key findings and insights were compiled to highlight pain points, areas of improvement, and user needs.
User Personas
After collecting & understanding customers' needs, frustrations, and motivations, I created 3 user personas with different Archetypes. These personas were used in making design decisions and gave the broad scope of users a visual representation.
Competitor Analysis
Venmo’s direct competitors include some of the other payment mobile apps, as well as PayPal, which currently owns Venmo.
Key Competitor Analysis Findings
There are currently no other competitors that have a similar tool that allows the addition of a photo to a transaction
Venmo’s core emphasis is bringing a social element to casual transactions between friends. Competitors are not concerned with being ‘social’ and prioritize areas like business and simplicity.
Competitors prioritize privacy over social aspects their apps.
All competitors, and Venmo, are pushing Crypto integration and introducing physical cards.
Cash app has the youngest target demographic, Zelle and PayPal are targeted at a bit of an older demographic than Venmo
Define
Mind Map - User Flow
Mind Map
A mind map was created to discover and expand what the Venmo brand is about, and how the new feature would integrate itself into the Venmo identity.
Task Flow
A task flow was utilized to represent a user’s journey through the process of using the Photo-Snap feature for the first time. The flow was the baseline user journey for designing the prototype and the MVP following that.
UX Design
Sketches - Wireframes - Prototype
Sketches
To start the design process, I started to sketch versions of how I envisioned the Photo-Snap tool looking. These sketches are the very first wireframes that will eventually become the completed Photo-Snap tool.
Wireframes
For this process, I started wireframing at the highest level of fidelity. These wireframes eventually became the prototype used for usability testing.
Prototype
A prototype was developed to test the usability of the new feature and to see how the Photo-Snap feature flows. This Prototype has the user requesting their friend, Olivia, for some money from a trip to Lowes. The user’s task is to use the new feature and upload a picture of the receipt to the request.
Revisions & Improvement
Usability Testing - Onboarding Revisions & Improvements
Feature Improvements
The area of focus that required the most testing was the onboarding, or introduction process, to the new feature. It went through 3 rounds of testing to end with the final version. The revisions are shown below in the order they were made.
Usability Test Findings
Usability testing was done with users, who had previously been interviewed, to discover the best way to introduce the new feature to the users. The introduction, or onboarding, of the new feature went through 3 versions with testing at each stage. Below are the findings of each testing and what each version looked like.
Version 1
The first iteration had the feature introduced in the banner/announcement area that Venmo uses to promote the Venmo Cards and Crypto features. This version was fine but did not give a lot of information.
Version 2
The second iteration had the feature introduced in an overlay pop-up screen that has a 3-step introduction to the feature. This version gave the most information and the users were unable to ignore or overlook the new information.
Version 3 (Final Version)
The third iteration is a hybrid between versions 1 and 2. It utilizes the existing space present in Venmo from version 1 and contains all the same information as version 2, without interrupting the user journey as much with an intrusive pop-up introduction.
What’s Next?
Next Steps
Hand off to the development team to put the designs of the new tool into action.
Create a moderation system to regulate and moderate the addition of images to the Venmo Feed
Soft launch the new feature in specific, targeted markets.
Launch the new Photo-Snap tool and promote it on social channels.
What’s after Photo-Snap?
After interviewing many Venmo users, there are loads of additions that can be made to the Photo-Snap tool that would be desirable to the users. Some examples include adding multiple photos, a short video option, utilizing Ai to split bills, creating mass requests and payments, and repeatable payments, to name a few. Photo-Snap is just the beginning when it comes to making Venmo’s social features reach their full potential.