Integrating the Donation feature in the Venmo App for Social Impact
Project Overview
Duration: 2 week Sprint
Team: Chris Gross, Mike Kim, Ezra Tollett, Supriya Gawas
Tools: Pen, Paper, Sketch, Invision, Xtensio
Device: Mobile
MY Role: User Research | Competitive Analysis | Sketching| Ideating | User Testing
What is VENMO?
Venmo is a free peer-to-peer (P2P) money transfer service, that lets you make and share payments with friends.
Friends can be found via: phone number, email, username or by scanning a QR code.
Users can see what their friends are using Venmo to pay for and to whom via its social feed .
Client Brief
Venmo wants to strengthen their brand by offering donating options to the users for social impact.
With users accustomed to sending money quickly, Venmo would like to introduce a way for users to send money via their app to causes they care about—whether that be a nonprofit that combats hunger or a unique Kickstarter campaign.
The Challenge
How do we leverage the social aspect of Venmo to encourage and facilitate charitable giving?
The Objective
How can you leverage the social aspect of Venmo to encourage giving?
How this fits within the app largely focused on individuals?
My design process
1. USER RESEARCH
competitive research
1.Peer to Peer Payment Services
We carried out a market research of the companies like Google, Square cash, Snap cash, Dwolla, Zelle which have eliminated cash or check transactions.
2.Competitive Analysis - Charitable Institutions
We also analyzed the giving aspect of charitable institutions. Most of them have different approaches for payments like one-time or subscribed payment. But people are unable to donate regularly as the process is long and tedious and people are vary of donating to unknown causes.
Key Takeaways
Venmo transactions are quick and painless while other services have withdrawal charges and longer timings.
One can pay a friend using a credit or debit card as a source, which has been a big hit among teens across college campuses.
The social feed of Venmo is unique and also makes integrating the donation feature easier .
Most of the Charitable Institutions have a one-time or subscribed payment method.
Venmo Friend feed
Surveys and Interviews
During our research, we created a qualifying survey to target regular Venmo users who were also frequently donors to charitable institutions.
We conducted user interviews. Most of the users were millennials who used Venmo for splitting restaurant bills, paying for a drink or paying rent to their room-mates.
INTERVIEW TAKEAWAYS
The youngest users were most likely to pay attention to social tabs, and to make public transactions.
Younger users charitable donations were most likely to be small sums, and given on impulse.
Older users were made most uncomfortable by social tabs.
“I feel more inclined to give if other people are doing it. It stirs the thought. I have pressure to be more generous. Monkey see, monkey do.”
persona
From our research, we complied personas who identified the motivations and pain points of Venmo users. Venmo provides a seamless way for young people - a coveted donor group - to give money to their favorite nonprofits.
Millennials being the prime users of Venmo, we kept Kyle as our primary persona.
2. design
Sketching and ideation
Approach 1 vs Approach 2
minimum viable product
We looked at the existing Venmo user flow and tried to keep the steps as simple and minimal as possible. It was possible to integrate the giving feature by two approaches into the app.
Approach 1 : You can donate to charities later as part of your normal transaction.
Approach 2 : You can search your preferred charities and donate.
3. Develop
Approach 1 - Donate while using peer to peer payment
P2P payment - Choose a friend - select the amount to be paid - reason its paid for, and also add a charity to donate to, choose the amount of percentage you want to donate. After that you can choose to pay one-time or monthly.
Approach 2 - Search Charities and Donate
Direct Donation - Another option to donate is through the landing page. Users can directly choose the donate option and browse through their favorite charities. They can sign-up to pay monthly, quarterly or annually.
4. user testing
User testing was a crucial part of our design process, as it shed light on the unrealistic assumptions we made regarding the user-flow.
Most of the users had different ways of navigating the app and they seemed to be confused by the new feature introduction.
By giving the option of choosing to donate before the cash-out transaction, seemed to be confusing to most.
5. iterate
We carried out multiple user tests and found that users were consistently confused about the user flow. We reiterated our user flow by having the donate option right after clicking the final payment screen. This seemed to be more relatable to the users.
By giving a donate option right after the transaction is done-
It doesn't deviate the user from the current task at hand and also gives them an option of giving a small amount at the end of the transaction.
It is easier to donate now as the charities are pre-determined.
Re-Iterated Prototype
Approach 1- Direct Donation
Approach 2- P2P Donation
Looking forward
Since Venmo is a pre-existing app, we tried creating an MVP that gave multiple donating options to its varied demographic users . By seeing the charitable feeds of their friends, users are motivated to stay in touch with their favorite charities
- I would further explore and apply the gamification aspect to donating. Users can be given special badges and be able to show if off to friends as they reach their goals.
- They can have a personal profile donation feed with the details of their donation transactions.
- They can also pull out their tax records from their profile information.