Background
As the social consciousness of the average consumer continues to increase, large companies can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines and pretend it’s business as usual. With a focus on social innovation global companies can become the triggers for social change.
With users accustomed to sending money quickly, Venmo would like to introduce a way for users to send money via their app to causes they care about.
My team and I developed a set of features designed to give Venmo users opportunities to donate through three different areas of the iOS app.
Category
Mobile design
Role & time
Two-week long group project - Personally responsible for competitive analysis, digital wire-framing, and prototyping
Tools
Sketch, InVision, Zoom
Business Research
Competitive Analysis
We kicked off the research phase of our project with a competitive analysis and identified that the current landscape was comprised of three distinct categories:
Person to person (Circle, Zelle, Cash app)
Person to merchant (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square)
Both (Paypal)
However, it was far more important to understand the current conventions and existing services in the donations space. We identified Facebook Donations as a leader in this area and one that shared a key common element with Venmo - a social layer. We hypothesized that many existing Venmo users were currently engaging in charitable activities via Facebook donations and moved into user interviews.
User Research
Interviews & Affinity Maps
Our discussion guide for interviews was centered around uncovering insights around the following topics:
How are Venmo users engaging with the iOS app currently?
How are Venmo users making donations currently?
After we had interviewed a handful of users, affinity mapping allowed us to convert otherwise seemingly unrelated pull quotes into clear and actionable themes that could drive the project forward.
1) Venmo used for small and quick transactions
2) Most users have causes they feel strongly about but don’t donate unless they are prompted
3) Users enjoy donating via “Facebook Birthday Posts” because they are able to help a friend and give to a cause at the same time
We saw two very different personas begin to emerge. One being the type of user who has a sense of responsibility to give back but is unlikely to do so unless they are presented the opportunity. The second being a user who has causes they feel strongly about and goes out of their way to give unprompted. We coined these personas the opportunistic donor and the active donor.
The Opportunistic Donor:
Primary persona
Transact in smaller amounts
Discover opportunities to donate through social media
The type to donate a dollar at checkout
The Active Donor:
Secondary persona
Transact in larger amounts
Donte to causes with deep personal connections
Design
Design Studio
With a primary persona clearly defined we were able to launch into a design studio exercise that allowed us to generate a huge amount of potential solutions in a short period of time. There were large questions that arose from this exercise that needed to be answered through user testing;
Should we center the experience around donating to friends causes or the causes of the user? (My cause vs. Friends cause)
Where should the donation feature(s) be placed in order to not disrupt the primary functionality of the app?
Should users be allowed to select multiple causes?
To what degree should uses be able to define their amount?
Paper Prototype Feedback
Early rounds of paper prototype tests gave us great feedback without wasting time creating digital mockups. What we heard from users was that the experience of making a donation created too many decisions for the user and felt obtrusive and distracting from the primary goal of the app. Essentially, users voiced that our proposed designs would change the way they viewed Venmo in a negative way.
This gave us answers to most of the key questions outlined above. However one very important question still remained…
Are users more motivated to donate to their friend’s causes or their own?
We decided we needed an answer to this question before proceeding to a mid fidelity digital prototype - but our team was split.
One team member approached the question by placing weight primarily on the quantitative data coming back from testing. In other words, how many users gave to their own vs. their friends cause. Other team members weighed testing results with early research and reached a conclusion that way. Irrespective of how we got there, the reality was we were…
Stuck in decision limbo and had a few hours before parting ways for the holidays.
We debated each of our viewpoints to no avail. Given the time crunch we weren’t able to give our proposed solutions the merit based debate they deserved. In the 11th hour we found a path forward. We concluded the best approach would be to…
