Venmo App Redesign
Introduction
Venmo is a popular mobile app used for sending payments digitally between people. It is commonly used casually among friends for repayment or gifts, effectively replacing the need for cash. It can also be used by businesses to facilitate more formal transactions. With the Venmo app having so many common use cases, it is important to have a simple and clear user experience and flow. That’s why I set out to see how I could improve the experience of the app.
User Research
In order to figure out how people most commonly use the app and what their experiences with it are like, I began by conducting user research. I created a short four-question survey, which was taken by 29 college students from James Madison University.
After receiving the responses, I found that most users of the app tend to use it at least once a week. The most common issue people had with the app was the process of finding other users, with navigation being the second most common user experience issue.
Two questions in the survey were open-ended. The first open-ended question asked users what they thought of the layout of the profile section of Venmo. Several people responded saying they had issues with the features in this section.
“Friends and payments can be cluttered compared to a simple layout like Instagram followers/following”
“It used to be easier to navigate — newer updates make it more difficult to see my past transactions and friends.”
The second open-ended question simply asked if there was anything else that people would want to change about the app. Common responses again included making the layout simpler and making it easier to find people.
Current Design
Currently, the Venmo profile tab includes the user’s username, QR code for sharing, Venmo balance, and transaction history. However, this transaction history is currently split up into 2 separate tabs, “transactions” and “stories”.
The “transactions” tab shows every previous transaction and the amount, but with no other information. This tab also includes a search button and requests button, where users can request others for money or fulfill others’ requests.
The “stories” tab again shows every previous transaction and amount, except with the addition of the descriptions that were added by users during the transaction. This tab, however, does not include the search or request buttons.
This combination of both redundancy and inconsistency makes it clear as to why many users have trouble with this part of the app.
Additionally, several users mentioned the difficulty of finding other people in the app. The current design provides no easy way for a user to easily see all of their current friends in one place.
Design Question
As I found in my user research, the most common issue people had with the app was the process of finding other users, with navigation being the second most common issue. Unfortunately, the issue of finding other users seems to be rooted in the underlying search technology, so I decided to put more focus on the payment history issue while still keeping the second pain point in mind.
Pain point 1: Complexity and clutter of payment history
Pain point 2: Difficulty finding other users
These two pain points are both very personal and seem to go hand in hand: friends, and payments between them. This helped me to figure out the ultimate design question:
How might we improve the experience of a Venmo user
viewing their interactions with others?
Ideation and Wireframes
This gave me a new idea: Similar to the Instagram profile page having buttons for following and followers, I could add two new buttons to the Venmo profile page: Friends and Payment History. This would help to de-clutter the profile page, and additionally make it easier to see all of a user’s friends in one place. Although this does not completely solve the technology issue of searching for new users, I believe that having a clear friends list would at least help that pain point to an extent.
When thinking about this design question, it was important to take into account specific comments and suggestions from users. For example, when asked about the profile design, one person mentioned the Instagram profile as an example of a more organized layout.
To address the main pain point, complexity and clutter of payment history, the payment history would be moved from the main profile page to a separate page. In order to simplify the experience, the separate tabs for transactions and stories would be removed, and all transactions would show user descriptions by default. To make the list easier to read, a dropdown menu could also be available to jump to specific months.
Visual Design
After further developing the wireframes to be more consistent with Venmo’s design, I came out with the final design. This design fully solves the main pain point of a cluttered profile and payment history, and improves upon the pain point of finding other users by providing a way to easily access friends.
The new design is simple and provides clear options to the user to help them get to the information that they need. Viewing the transaction history is now simplified, making it easier to see all important information and easily jump to older transactions. This design refresh would be able to greatly improve the user experience by both de-cluttering the profile page, and providing easy access to commonly used features.