Venmo Redesign
UX Designer
05/2020
Venmo is a digital wallet that allows you to make and share payments with friends and family. It also creates a fun way to pay and request money that replaced traditional online payment.
Problem Statement
Despite the easy peer-to-peer payment and how it turns a quick transaction into a fun social interaction tool, there are no options that can help users to split the fare. Users need to send and request payment individually that may create calculation errors. Thus, my goal is to integrate a simple user experience and intuitive transaction process for splitting bills.
Venmo users have to do repetitive work to split bills and ensure they are doing the right math to request or send an accurate fund to the right recipient
Research
Uber and Uber Eats integrated Venmo as one of the options that allow users to split fares easily. According to Uber, there were more than 6 million Venmo payments that have mentioned their name in the transactions. Therefore, it definitely indicates that Venmo is one of the most preferred peer-to-peer payments apps.
Frankly, it is a convenient way to pay for goods or services digitally. However, Venmo itself does not have any options that allow users to split bills and purchases easily. Instead, users will need to request payments one by one which allows more cognitive load that could've been a simple task to complete.
User Painpoints
Making multiple requests is time-consuming
Having to make more than one payment requests to complete one task can be frustrating
Calculation is a hassle
Splitting bills requires some cognitive load to do the right math for splitting checks accurately
Difficult to keep track of multiple amounts
Users can't always remember how much each person owes for one bill
Goals
Charge bills efficiently with one request
Integrating bill splitting process to decrease the chances of users from making errors in the request payment flow by adding wrong recipients
Scan bills to split fares
Increases the number of accurate transactions that prevent users from entering the wrong bill amount
Easy to track number of amounts that is owed
Once the request is sent, users can easily track how much each recipient owes and determines who has completed the request and who has not
Persona
Creating these two personas helped me to better understand the area of improvement when requesting and sending payments. Claire and Michael often use Venmo to split bills with their friends and roommates, they both experience similar pain points for requesting multiple payments and fear of adding the wrong recipients.
Ideation
Added "split check" button as default on the homepage that can quickly assist users to split the check
Homescreen
Add Friends as the recipients
Allows users to easily add recipients from scanning the QR Code or simply add friends from the list of Top People that users pay or request payments from them frequently
Add Groups as the recipients
Categorized two types of recipients: Friends and Groups helps users to save time from finding the right people to request payments for rent, carpooling or groceries, etc
Users can also create groups for easy payments between the people they often pay and request funds
Scan Bill
Scanning bill decreases the amount of time to manually calculate how much each person owes and prevents users from making calculation errors
There is also a group of users who feel more secure when they manually enter each item to calculate. Therefore, adding an option to enter items one by one helps to gain their security
Review Receipt
After scanning or entering items manually, users can finalize the bill by reviewing the receipt before selecting right items to each person and charge them correctly
Each item will be automatically charged for service fees and taxes accurately. Users can also tap on the button "Add missing item" to re-edit the bill
Split Check
Splitting the bill by selecting the right items for each person or users can hit the "Split Equally" button instead of charging their friends individually
The blue circle is an indicator of whom the user is assigning the item at that specific moment. Once users finished charging each person, the amount owed will appear under the recipient's name
Finalize Payment to Request
After finishing splitting the check, users can now charge recipients all at once with a fun message or emoji to indicate what the request is for
It also shows the total amount owed by recipients to help users to keep track of the numbers of payment requested
As the number of Venmo users is growing, adding a feature where users can easily split bills and purchases can decrease the time for a repetitive work of requesting each person separately. Additionally, it can also ease the user's frustration that may lead to calculation errors or adding wrong recipients, and request wrong payments. This also encourages users to use the embedded calculator to increase the accuracy of the amount that needs to be charged from each recipient.
From the user experience perspective, it satisfies the user's needs to easily split checks digitally by hitting one button that guides them to complete tasks with small efforts. Meanwhile, it can potentially increase task success rate (the percentage of correctly request payments by users), decreases task completion time (the amount of time it takes for users to request multiple payments on one bill) and raises net promoter score (users satisfaction measured through their willingness to recommend Venmo to others).