Pay It Forward concept feature
project Brief
Venmo, a secure money transfer application, wants to expand their services to make a difference in the world by introducing a way for users to send money via their app to causes they care about.
My roles: User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, and Usability Testing
My Teammates: Erica Neumann and Hanna Stratman
Project Duration: Two Weeks
What’s the problem?
Venmo users want to increase their donation frequency and have the ability to interact with their social network without increasing the time it takes to complete those transactions.
DISCOVERY
WHat’s the solution?
Pay It Forward is a concept feature that allow users to conveniently find verified charities, securely donate, and track personal donations within a social network.
WHy do people want to donate?
To kick off the project, we researched the psychology of donating and it all boiled down to these few reasons: trust, social gain, ego, and altruism. After filtering out all our preliminary research, we decided to expand on how to:
Make giving contagious
Make donating accessible for people who feel like they can’t afford to
Make donating quick and delightful through gamification
Make donating approachable by using simple language
Reinforce the legitimacy of charity organizations
Competitive Analysis
Through this research method, we found that there aren’t a lot of social aspects involved in these competing apps due to transactions being private. However, when looking at Venmo, it has three separate feeds that allow you to interact with others. These include global feed, feed within your personal network and then your direct transactions between you and another user. Although Venmo has a strong presence of social aspect within their app, through user surveys, almost none of Venmo’s users interact with their feeds. Based on this, we focused a lot on how we can utilize the already existing feeds with our donation feature.
DEFINE
USer surveys & Interviews
Some important things to note from our data is that People have a very complex relationship with the donation process. Many say they give purely out of altruistic motivations, but data shows that our donors are highly influenced by social media whether it be through Facebook or Instagram (which both have very integrated donation capabilities). Again, we emphasized the thought of growing the use of Venmo’s feed.
81% of users also said they’d be more likely to donate within an app more frequently if their credit card was constantly linked or saved into their profile. Therefore, we made it a point to make sure that our feature would be better streamlined than our competitors.
WHO ARE OUR USERS
Matt, The Altruistic Giver
History teacher in Chicago and former Teach For America employee.
Loves spending his free time hosting parties on his deck, playing pick up sports and camping.
Wants to continue to make an impact by donating to new causes but hasn’t found a way to streamline his donation process and keep track of his giving.
Katelyn, The Social Donor
Junior web developer at a startup company.
Interested in pop culture and loves spending time with friends at the bars.
Wants a small way to give back to her community, but has trouble finding and trusting the validity of charitable organizations.
DESIGN
DESIGN STUDIO & PRototyping
Because our research pointed us to two different types of users, our group decided to work on a flow for each Matt and Katelyn. Matt’s flow contained the explore page and the capability of filtering out different charities with ease. Katelyn’s flow focused on the round-up feature that made it seamless for her to donate.
We thought about layout and features in each step of the process for the users separately and came together to informally present what we envisioned for the user interface. We combined the highlights of each of our ideas and created high fidelity prototypes. Initially using paper prototypes to start off, we usability tested on some users to gain insight on what really works and which features needed to be improved upon.
From paper prototypes, we went through iterations using Sketch and ultimately came to a high fidelity prototype, one for each of our users.
matt’S USER FLOW Prototype
KATELYN’S USER FLOW Prototype
What we’ve learned:
Explore: We wanted to utilize Venmo’s existing explore function because we gathered from our data that close to none of the people use it. So, killing two birds with one stone, we made this feature into something people could easily access to find charities they can donate to and it’s all incorporated into their existing flow.
Social Proof: Many people trust and use Venmo to easily pay friends and family. We wanted to make the donations and charities easy to trust as well, so we’ve included verification badges on the organization’s profile pages. On top of that, we’ve added in the Explore Page, a section titled “Backed by Friends,” so the user is aware of what their network is donating to, furthering social proof.
Altruism: People want to donate and to feel good about it. They also want to know a good way to track progress both on the user end and the charity as a whole. To provide that experience, we’ve created the Round Up feature for people who feel as though they can’t afford to donate, we incorporated the Pay It Forward feature as a way for users to easily navigate through different charities. Last, but not least, the Venmo Dashboard that would appear on a user’s personal profile would show their statistics, keep record of how much they’ve donated to and what causes they’ve contributed to.