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Big PrismHi Tech
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Overview

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For this project, we have chosen to tackle a redesign of the Venmo app. Venmo is primarily used for sending money between peers and is a separate application outside of banking services. It has a wide demographic and a large user base, but its design lacks intuitiveness and discoverability in places.

Venmo Redesign, 2021

Tasks

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  1. Scan the QR code in front of your screen using the Venmo application.

  2. Transfer $1 to the tester. 

    • Change the privacy setting on this transaction

    • Change your default privacy settings for the whole application

  3. Request $1 from the tester.

  4. How would you find out if you have any outstanding transactions that haven’t been completed yet? 

    • ​Scenario A: Someone has not paid you in a while. How would you follow up on getting the payment?

  5. Assume I sent you $20 on November 1st, 2021 for dinner. How would you find that specific transaction?

  6. Assume you’re splitting a group tab of $59.75 equally between 7 people. How would you go about calculating how much each person owes and requesting payments?

Pre-task

 

  1. Message: We’re testing the app, not the user; Don’t be afraid of hurting our feelings, be honest about your experience with the site which will be most helpful for us; Please talk about your thought process out loud throughout the whole exercise so we have an idea of why you’re using the site in the way you are

  2. Do you have experience in transferring money through phone applications?

    • ​Which application(s) do you use?

  3. Do you use crypto transfer services on money transferring applications?

    • ​​If yes, have you ever used Venmo for this function?

    • If yes, how does it compare to other applications you’ve used?

Research & User Testing

Our research consisted of testing various Venmo users with simple tasks. We asked them pre-task & post-task questions. 

Post-task

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  1. What were your most and least favorite tasks? Why?

  2. How frequently do you use the scan feature? Would you have a tendency to do that through the application?

  3. Would you recommend Venmo as a way to transfer cryptocurrency? Why?

  4. Would you ever consider using a Venmo debit or credit card? Why or why not?

  5. If you were transferring money with a person you don’t know or interact with much, would your approach for following up on a payment be different than following up with a friend?

  6. What is a feature(s) that you feel is missing from this application?

  7. Would you recommend Venmo to other users?

Our testing demonstrated that users made similar errors and found certain features to be inconvenient, unintuitive or annoying. Specifically when tasked to look for the incomplete transactions button, users expressed difficulty with this and stated how small and hidden the unlabeled button is. Other features users found to be confusing was the fact that they could only press the "remind" button once. Users were unsure if it was the app not functioning properly or if those were the parameters of the remind feature. The last main error occurred when asked how users would go about searching for a specific transaction. Users didn’t know an internal search function existed until we prompted them further.

Testing Analysis

Identifying the Problem

Once you do click to the profile tab, the user’s transaction history is divided into two categories that perform essentially the same function with minor aesthetic changes. Users noted that this distinction was confusing, partly because the search and incomplete buttons are only in the transactions tab.

Technically there isn’t a traditional home page for the Venmo app, but when it first loads the default page it opens to is the social feed, rather than the user’s personal feed or the payment function. Users noted that this was somewhat annoying because it prioritized something besides the key functions of the app.

Redesign Plan

Through our user testing we found that users had trouble locating certain functions and pages of the Venmo mobile app on nearly all the tasks we prompted them with. They were usually able to recover in a reasonable amount of time, but some of the less popular / more specific features appeared unexpectedly difficult to find for such a widely used platform. Because of these takeaways from our user testing, we decided to redesign the general layout and architecture of the app. Most of the features work well once users are able to find them, so instead of focusing on a specific feature we felt it was more intuitive to redesign the layout of said features to improve discoverability and make the app more intuitive to use.

Sketches

Sketching helped our team identify different features we could incorporate into our redesign. 

This sketch introduces a complete / incomplete toggle feature to navigate the transaction history on the profile page, as well as a search bar and filter feature

This sketch keeps the pay / request feature on the same page as the social feed and alots the Crypto, Settings, and Profile pages to the bottom nav bar. It also included a drop down menu in the top right for further functions.

Prototypes

Interact directly with the prototypes below!

Prototype 1

Prototype 2

For Prototype #1, we decided to swap the bottom navigation menu with a three-tab toggle feature at the top of the page. This was meant to provide more visibility to the whole app, group its features more clearly, and allow the Scan and Pay features to stick at the bottom. The right-most tab is the profile page, the middle tab is the user’s personal transaction history, and we’ve segmented these transactions into complete and incomplete payment tabs. The left-most tab is the social feed, which we didn’t change much.

For Prototype #2 we changed the bottom icons in the hopes that they are more intuitive to users. The bottom icon from left to right order goes from cryptocurrency page, debit card page, main feed, reminder page, and the profile page. Users will always be defaulted to the main feed page upon opening the Venmo application. The reminder page now has its own icon at the bottom of Venmo. We decided to have the reminder icon at the bottom because many of the users we tested noted that they had trouble finding the reminder page.

Based on additional user testing, prototype #1 seemed to be a good step in the right direction toward a more intuitive layout. Most of the feedback on what didn’t work for users would be easy to adjust / solve, and there wasn’t any negative feedback about the navigation system itself. Redesigning the icons to be more intuitive is likely the biggest challenge we’d face since people have different visual associations. Overall, we feel this redesign does a good job of laying out its features while being visually clean and highly usable.

Final Prototype

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