Venmo
Existing App Feature Integration, Research & Testing
Overview
Background
While Venmo provide simple and easier option for payment between friends and family, it does not help you manage your spendings. The average of household debt is $16,000 for those without a mortgage. With this said, Venmo would now like to move into developing a tool for user’s financial management.
Responsibilities
Product design, Research, User Flows, Information Architecture, Sketching, Wireframing, UI, Prototyping
Used Tools
Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, InVision
Key Outcomes
Design of a personal finance management feature embedded in the current Venmo app.
Timeline
2 weeks
Note: I do not work for, nor am I affiliated with Venmo. I completed this UX case study as a self initiated project to showcase my product design process.
01 Research
Before I started the project I first wanted to learn about the general users of Venmo.
Research Plan
Research Goals
Define the main target audiences.
Gain insights on user’s experience on personal finance.
Define trends and market of the fintech app.
Assumptions
This was a project with fairly short timeline so I wanted to set parameter of the research to prevent endlessly looking for more informations. If I am able to prove these points, I would know that I have done enough research.
Venmo is fairly new app, so most of the users will be millenials
Users are not willing to install separate app to manage their finance.
Market Research
Once I mapped out how I will conduct the research, I went online to start market research. I gathered general trends, demographics, and lists of possible competitors.
“72% of Venmo users are Millennials (18-34)”
“63% of Millennials do not have budgeting app but are willing to use them ”
AI saving management
Automatic finance manager
Competitive Analysis
After finding some potential competitors through market research, I tried to pick both direct and indirect competitors. Through competitive analysis, I notice that they jam pack lots of information on the screen. The designs were very robust which looked like it was aiming for more mature audiences.
With good understanding of the current markets and competitors, I moved on to understand Venmo’s existing patterns in the app. With Heuristic evaluation, I examine the app in details. I discovered that Venmo uses its brand color for actionable items and uses friendly languages to aim toward its main users (Millennials). See detail here.
User Interview
Once I completed research on existing resources online, I wanted to go ahead and learn average user’s patterns when managing their personal finance and using Venmo. While deciding which candidates we should interview, I created provisional persona to list out all possible options of demographics based on secondary research. See detail here. I chose user interview for primary research because it gives the most raw and detailed insights of the users.
Requirements: uses Venmo app at least once a week.
Age: 19-30
Methods: Video chat
Questions: Experiences on managing personal finance, typical usage of Venmo
While conducting user interview, I wanted to also find out the relationship between the income level and awareness of their financial situations. I asked participants about their rough range of income when asking their demographic information. I soon realized that income related information is very sensitive subject and some were worried this information would be exposed to others. I then chose not to include in my research.
02 Synthesize
Empathy Map
To synthesize gathering from user interviews, I proceeded empathy map. I reviewed my interview findings notes to put down each observations on sticky notes. Different colors represent different participants to see what are common user behaviors. Once clustered similar notes into small groups, I then documented insights and user needs.
User Persona
Empathy map showed me the majority of Venmo’s users’ needs, goals, and frustrations, so I decided to make a user persona to define user who we are creating this features for. Later on, I will be referring back to this person while making design decisions.
03 Ideate
Looking back at user’s behavior insights and user’s needs I came up with HMW questions to ideate upon it.
“How might we help Will review his spendings easily?”
“How might we provide Will the purpose of saving?”
Group Brainstorming Session
With these HMW questions, I conducted a group brainstorming to gather ideas from people with different backgrounds. With COVID-19 going on, we could not physically meet up, so we used Zoom for video chat, and Miro to have virtual collaboration space.
All were given 5 min to write down any ideas
Repeated for all HMW questions
Each explained their ideas then others had time to build ideas from one another.
Product Roadmap
Based on the standards that was created, I looked at all ideas generated from brainstorm and gave priority levels. Also tried to mark what each features satisfies which goals to measure the importance. See detail here.
Trade-Offs
While I had many amazing ideas focused on different aspect of the personal finance management features, the project had relatively short timeline. While considering which feature to implement for this project I had to think about difficulties of implementing each features. Spending tracker was great feature to add but seeing majority of user sharing payments, without retrieving all credit card info, it was hard to track every spendings of users. I decided to focus on features that help with savings since that was one of Will’s goals.
“Having enough money to be ready for future”
04 Information Architecture
Sitemap
Now that we have decided which feature to be implemented, I looked at existing structure of Venmo app and saw where the new features for saving could be placed.
UI Requirement
Knowing where the new feature will be placed in app, I fine tuned what features should be present in which screens and high level requirements to organized what UI elements I need to create. See detail here.
Task Flow + User Flow
After settling the placement of the feature I explored user’s experience on user flow to see what kind of decisions the users will make and what kind of options the user will need. See detail here.
05 Interaction Design
All details from UI requirements now need to turn into visual elements. In order for them to work together to create coherent and organized composition, I first roughly sketched out each pages.
Once sketches are done, I turned them into high-fidelity wireframes.
High Fidelity Wireframe + Prototype
I tried hard to stick with existing look and feel of Venmo’s UI. Also all actionable elements and behavior had to follow how current users are familiar with.
Usability Test
When trying to see if users with no knowledge of this new savings feature, moderated usability testing was the best method. Once conducting the usability test with interactive prototypes, all tests were recorded to document all comments and behaviors of users.
Affinity Map
Revisiting notes and recordings of usability test, I was able to see part of feature that worked well and other parts where users were struggling. These insights then helped me make priority revisions on my prototype.
Priority Revisions
As I was looking through common patterns and frustrations, I discovered that people had hard time understanding the menu “savings goals.” They did not immediately relate it to savings list. Another common behavior was that once user has created a savings goal, they needed to check their new goal is added to this savings list.
07 Conclusion
Reflection
Finishing the project, it was first time trying out the group brainstorming session. In the process I learned that facilitating a group brainstorm session requires a lot of preparation due to lack of context of the participants. While it was hard for others to keep motivated to come up with wild ideas, once it happened we were left with one of the most interesting ideas that I would not have thought of. For the futures, I will try to think of a lot of ice breakers and ideas to make them understand the context.
Next Step
Since due to small timeline of the project I was not able to implement all financial management related features. Thus I would like to add feature to connect with all other credit cards and tracking all of the spending on Venmo app.