Venmo Redesign
reimagining payment sharing
Stanford University, ME115B: Product Design Methods, 4 week team project
Challenge
In a team of 3, redesign an existing app to improve its user experience.
My Role
User researcher, designer
Skills
User research and user testing
Hierarchical task analysis
Rapid prototyping
Figma
Teamwork
The Problem
In an increasingly digital world, Venmo has become a staple for many college students. If you don’t know what Venmo is, it’s a payment sharing app that allows people to pay and request money. According to the description on their website, it is a “social payments app allowing people to split bills, pay each other back for rent, and make purchases at approved merchants - all the while making these life stories more fun and less awkward.”
While Venmo is certainly useable, we decided to focus on three tasks that were unnecessarily difficult:
Splitting bills
Fulfilling requests
Searching past payments
User Research
After identifying three main focus points, we performed a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) to determine where in the process the users were having difficulty.
Design Process
After identifying pain points, we brainstormed solutions, created flowcharts, and made a paper prototype in order to rapidly test our solutions. We tested our paper prototype with users, and make tweaks to the design based on their feedback. We then created a prototype in Figma, and tested/tweaked the design again.
The Fixes
Introducing our redesigned Venmo. Although we decided to keep the general aesthetic of Venmo, rather than focusing on community (which is a great sentiment but let’s be real no one really cares), we fully rebooted the organization to reflect what people actually use Venmo for: requesting and paying. In addition, we added several functions to facilitate splitting bills and searching past payments to make the user experience more intuitive and user friendly.
Unlike the current design, in this redesign the ability to add multiple people is intuitive and easy to understand. It also allows you to change individual amounts to split the bill exactly how you need.
We also added a new function: groups! If you constantly go out with the same group of friends or you and your roommates split rent each month, you no longer have to individually add them every time. With the group function, it’s easy to make groups and pay/request them.
We upgraded the search bar to allow you to search through past payments and add hashtags to keep your payments organized and easy to find.
Finally, we totally reorganized the main tabs. Not only have there been issues with privacy because of the visibility of public payments, but also no one really uses the community tab anyways. So instead, we chose groups, notifications, and personal as the three tabs in order to make paying and requesting as accessible as possible.