Venmo is a social payments app that allows users to pay and request money from their friends without the hassle of following up in person and dealing with physical cash. While Venmo is a widely used app that gives users a lot of perks, it does not yet have a system to organize payments or allow users to track spending without looking at hundreds of payments individually. For this project, we designed a new feature called “tag” to organize users' payments.
Before jumping into sketches, we completed competitive analysis with similar mobile banking apps such as PayPal, Zelle, and Apple Pay to see what they offered; and we noticed that none of them marketed a payment organization tool on their website.
Our key takeaway: None of the digital banking apps we looked at advertised a way to sort payments.
While we had a starting point, we wanted to make sure our idea had traction before we made the effort of building it out as a new feature. We conducted three initial exploratory user interviews to discover existing user pain points with the app. Users complained about the inability to pay groups of people, lack of security during transactions, inability to sort past payments, and inability to get refunds. We did more exploring on the app and found that there was a feature to pay groups, though not obvious. Venmo has also released a full refund feature that refunds purchases if something goes wrong. Due to the fact that two of the initial pain points had a solution in place, we focused on sorting/organizing.
Key Takeaway 🔑
Users don't know how to sort their past and current payments on Venmo.
With our hypothesis confirmed, we took a closer look at how Venmo organizes its payments. It uses the word “stories,” similar to Instagram, where it showcases all a user’s payments with a description, comment, and “like” option. There is no way to look at the total amount a user has Venmoed on group dinners, ride apps, or other purchases.
As you can see, the list of payments consistently keeps scrolling to the bottom of the page, with only a description that a user puts in rather quickly to get a scope on what the payment was for.
The app needed a better way to organize. So what feature could we implement?
To help users easily access their past payments and categorize their new ones, we created a tag feature. It gives users the ability to “tag” their transactions (e.g., Uber, food, rent) and use it for staying organized and budgeting in an efficient manner.
The Tag Feature Will...
Create a tag and add it while on the payment page ✏️
Sort through past payments on Venmo's stories page 📁
Track spending habits and budget 💸
When making our first iteration sketches, we wanted to utilize all the extra space Venmo had on its payment screen. We added a "Tag this payment" section at the button, where users could create their own tag or utilize Venmo's existing ones on a separate page. They could click on the tag icon on their own profile page as well, to see graphs of their spending habits per tag. This design was inspired by Klaviyo, an email service provider with similar organization tools, and Apple's Health app, which tracks a user's steps.
We conducted more user interviews and research to test out our mid-fi prototypes before moving to high-fi so we could make the appropriate adjustments. We interviewed a total of five users and got some valuable feedback about the experience.
Key Takeaways 🔑
Users wanted the ability to look at recent tags, choose popular tags, and create a tag all on one payment page. They could see this replacing the payment description altogether, since they were often too lazy to write it.
Tags on Payment Page
We scrapped our old UI and utilized section the bottom section of the payment page that Venmo already uses for options like sticker to rebuild our tag feature.
Our featured tags is section based on research off of user's most popular tags on Venmo in 2019.
My Analysis Page
Users can track their spending on their analysis page. We changed the graph layout completely due to user's confusion. This page showcases a user's spend all together, total spend per tag, and how far user's are off from their budget per tag.
Tags on Feed
Users can see their newly created tags on their feed with the highlighted tag icon.
Tags in Settings
Since users did speak to having access to their tags in settings, we recreated the settings page for Venmo to include it. A user can look at existing tags, create a new tag, or delete a tag in their settings.
During this project we learned how to how to work within an already established design system and a team of two. We were happy with the outcome of our product but in the future would like to dig deeper into the Tag Analysis pages because we do believe that would be a great area to do more in.
While creating this feature I personally understood how important it was to make sure a feature is accessible at all stages of the user journey with the least amount of steps to get there as possibe.
