VENMO

A mobile payment app for
social impact.

Venmo

Venmo is a mobile payment app that allows individuals to send money directly to each other. What sets Venmo apart among its young demographic users is its nontraditionally informal, fun, and social perspective of money.

Opportunity

Venmo wants to strengthen their brand, access a new demographic of users, and expand their services to non-profits by offering a new feature for social impact.

My roles

UX Designer - Since my teammates were strongest in UI design, I filled in the gaps of my team to lead in UX research, strategy, information architecture. 

Project Manager - Through the Purple PM app, I was able to manage my team of 3 to have quality, client-facing deliverables in a 2-week sprint at General Assembly. I also served as quality control on all deliverables.

Sorting for insights

We spent a lot of time doing multiple rounds of affinity mapping to make sure we caught all pain points, needs and opportunities. This exercise was the most time consuming, yet most important exercise that drove our project.

Trust is the key

What motivates and de-motivates users to donate is directly correlated to the amount of trust users have in a non-profit organization. Most times, trust is gained by friends’ recommendations as well as discovering through research that a non-profit is effective in the work they do and if money is distributed straight to the cause.

Non-profit donors need a transparent way to know their money is being used effectively for the cause because the lack of trust in non-profit organizations leads to a lack of giving.

Problem statement

The social giver

The primary persona, Owen, finds trustworthiness through the recommendation of friends. He values his friends' judgements on which causes to donate to and will go the extra mile to share causes on social media.

The informed researcher

The secondary persona, Jesse, finds trustworthiness in how transparent nonprofits are themselves. Jesse, less social than Owen, will do online research herself to determine if she can trust an organization.

In retrospect, Jesse is the type of friend Owen trusts and values for her judgement.

We believe that by creating a transparent donating experience on Venmo, we will achieve trust from nonprofit donors.

We know this to be successful when time spent researching and donating decreases and frequency of donations increases.

hypothesis

User journey

Owen's experience of donating on the Venmo platform is catalyzed when he sees friends donating to a specific non-profit, confirming its trustworthiness by being able to view the different friends who donated, and saving time in the process. 

Competition lacks transparency

Competition in the industry lacks trust by its hidden fees, confusing user experience and design, and lack of transparency where the money goes. Venmo aims to forego fees during donation processes in the trade-off to attract a larger user base.

Venmo as the missing link

The business concept model seems to work naturally with many forces enabling and bettering another. Venmo benefits in that may attract new users, improve their brand image, as well as get more exposure due to the sharing of causes by the user.

Lo-fi paper prototyping & usability testing

The paper prototype's goal was to integrate only the non-profit profile page into the Venmo app. We decided to go a minimalist approach to test a controlled amount of changes to the app. We found that:

• Users use the direct pay feature causing them to miss the profile page and not know what they were donating to.
• Unlike the typical Venmo user flow of ending up on the home page after payment, users wanted a celebratory confirmation page instead.
• Non-profit tags were clickable buttons that would suggest other non-profits in that category. This was not the primary intention but a great opportunity.

Mid-fi prototyping & usability testing

In the mid-fi prototype, we created a more robust feature by building out the clickable tags and directing users to the profile page. While this was successful, we were to improve on the following:

• Users wanted to be able to share externally that they donated to spread the word.
• A link to be able to research more.
• The payment confirmation screen of the interactive coins falling was seen as cheesy and not sending the right message. Users still wanted a more "official" and substantial confirmation.

Positive feedback

• Users said that because they were donating to a particular cause, they "felt a stronger connection to the organization."

• The feature felt like Venmo, but was novel to the app at the same time. It was a good balance of new and familiar.

Integrating tags in the architecture

The group designed ID tags for non-profit pages profile pages. Users expected this feature to be clickable and sort out non-profits similar. This feedback caused the development and implementation of level 3.

Get users to the profile page

We observed that there are many ways to make payments and made sure that each path has a clear destination to the key screen  “Non-Profit Profile Page.”

Transparent design

• Non-profits verified by Venmo
• Progress tracking bar
• Description of specifically what the money is going to
• Link to more information