Define

This is a case study on Venmo, an app that allows users to easily transfer money to each other. The app syncs with users’ credit/debit cards and bank accounts. Venmo has really transformed the place of money in relationships. Because it’s so easy to pay friends back now, no longer do we see friend groups taking turns treating each other to drinks or to food; instead, we hear individuals saying, “Just Venmo me later.”

In conducting user interviews, I decided to first set a user group of college students. Most users don’t find out about Venmo until college, and many Venmo users are college students because it’s the most convenient way to pay back friends. I decided to interview eight Cornell students for this study, and found that these were the most frequently mentioned pain points:

Although all of these problems are relevant, almost everyone I interviewed mentioned the first problem. Many users are accidentally paying others when they actually want to charge someone, and users also find the comment feature slow or inconvenient to use. Written in the People Problem Format:

When I send and request money from my friends, I want to quickly and accurately initiate the transfer, so I can get my money back or send my friend their money back quickly. But I can’t do that well because (1) the “Pay” and “Request” buttons are the same color, and (2) typing in a relevant comment into the required comment field takes time.

After narrowing down my focus to just one problem, I began ideating several solutions to solve this problem. Here are some of my sketches!

Below is my improved user flow for improving the common mistake of accidentally paying an individual when you want to request money from them instead, as well as for improving the efficiency of describing a transaction.

The user flow is as follows:

Andrew wants to request money from John Doe for an Uber → Creates a new transaction → Clicks John Doe → Sets dollar amount → Proceeds to add a description → Selects taxi emoji → Request

Ultimately, I decided to implement three changes:

I think my solution successfully improves the user flow for initiating a transaction, especially in making the button’s actions more clear (request vs. pay) and in contributing to more efficient descriptions. Additionally, removing the “Request | Pay” bar until the actions are actually allowed further contributes towards a less frustrating experience for users.

There are a few possible unintended outcomes that I can foresee occurring, however.

Despite these possible negative effects, I am still rather confident that my solution is a step towards the right direction in creating a less frustrating transaction initiating experience for Venmo users.

I spent around 4.5 hours completing this case study.

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