Venmo donation feature

UX Research + Design • April 2015

Project Summary

Venmo is a product that allows users to securely send money to people for free online and using their mobile app. Venmo users are accustomed to sending money quickly and easily, and leverage Venmo's social feed to view their friends' public transactions. 

Leveraging this preexisting network of users and social financial interactions, Venmo has a great opportunity to strengthen their brand by offering options for social impact. My team and I created this concept piece to introduce a social giving component into Venmo's existing mobile app, where users can send money to their favorite charitable causes. 

TEAM Venmo

The execution team for this project was comprised of myself and Aaron Neumann, Vardah Malik, and Joe Taft.

My Role

For the duration of this project I was responsible for UX research, design, and usability testing for our solution. After performing research and settling on features to be included in our MVP, we split the design into functional components. I had complete ownership over the charity detail and donation screens, and served as a consult on other components of the app.

Process

We completed the following over a two-week period:

Tools Used

Axure, Keynote, Sketch, SurveyMonkey, Excel, Gliffy, Placeit

DESIGN ARTIFACTS

We began our research by conducting interviews with Venmo users, then fielded a survey to gauge sentiment about charitable giving on mobile devices. Results of the survey were synthesized to generate an affinity diagram that informed our primary persona. We compiled  a list of competitors in mobile financial transactions arena and looked into their offerings, and conducted heuristic analyses of other charitable giving apps. The comparative analysis, coupled with our user research, led us to generate a prioritized list of features to include in our solution. 

One thing that was repeatedly stated in our interviews was this: please don’t mess up my process. Most people use Venmo for sending money several times a month, to the point that one user even described their process as being “muscle memory.” 

It was also clear that people want to know that their money goes to a reputable cause, and feel most comfortable giving to charities that they're familiar with, or that they've spent time researching. This research can take a lot of time, and users reported that they typically check out causes on charity watchdog sites, like Charity Navigator. 

We set out to design a donation experience to be integrated into Venmo's mobile app that does not interrupt the primary workflow (sending money), that also provides trustworthy information to the user about charitable causes, as to eliminate the need to exit the app in order to conduct their own research. 

We started sketching out options and used the design charrette technique to collaboratively develop viable solutions, then began mapping out the app's information architecture. It was a unique challenge to stay within the guardrails of adding a donation feature into Venmo, without overhauling its native functionality. 

THE SOLUTION

Our solution featured two new user flows: 1) seek out a charity and donate from the charity details page, and 2) donate a portion of your balance when cashing out. We adapted Venmo's existing menu and social feeds to accommodate the charitable giving feature, and were mindful about incorporating the social aspects of Venmo as a means to encourage giving.

I was responsible for designing the charity details pages, and chose to integrate charity details from Charity Navigator into the app to satisfy our users' desire to have data on hand in order to make informed giving decisions. 

Results

The solution we designed solved for the problem/opportunity that was presented, stayed true to Venmo’s brand, suited the needs of the individuals that we interviewed, and is a practical MVP with room for improvement and iterations, quite a few of which were pointed out during our usability tests on our V1 prototype.

After testing the app with Venmo users, I sat down with developers to discuss the integration of this feature into the existing app architecture. It didn't take long to discover that, while Charity Navigator has an API that would provide the needed information, it's an expensive endeavor. There are alternatives on the market (e.g. OrgHunter, Guidestar, Benevity) that are more affordable, but more research is needed to determine the best solution. 

Main Takeaways from Usability Testing

• Adapt the donation-through-cash-out flow to behave more like a tip on top of a bill, or similar mental model that users are already familiar with.
• Iterate on the newsfeed component. This is already an unpopular feature with users, and incorporating a fourth feed type into the currently existing framework did not test well with users. The other three feeds are based primarily on privacy settings on transactions, and donations are not (and will never be) a privacy setting.
• Cosmetic fixes throughout prototype, especially in the browse/search patterns for finding your favorite charities. Users couldn't make a distinction between charity logos and browsable charity category icons. 
• Better address visibility of system status (one of Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics), to meet users in each flow with explanations and navigation where it’s needed. Users saw that "favoriting" charities was an option, but couldn't grok why they would want to "favorite" a charity. Until they reached the cash out screen, it wasn't clear to them that their favorite charities were being collected for quick viewing/donating in this phase of the cash out process. This issue could be remedied with feature-based training or help overlays.