Venmo Split Bill Added Feature
*This is a personal passion project. I am not affiliated with Venmo.
Client
Student Capstone Project
Timeline
May - June 2021 (3 weeks)
My Role
UX Researcher & Designer
Team
Me and myself
Background
Venmo is a mobile payment service owned by PayPal with over 80% of users being Millennials or Gen Z. These users share and split expenses such as rent, meals, subscriptions, utilities, and more via the Venmo app.
As a fellow Millennial Venmo user, every month I use Venmo to split expenses like wifi and subscriptions with my roommate. Both of our biggest pain point is not having a way to create recurring requests or payments through the app.
This led me to begin my capstone project with the assumption that there may be a need for a recurring payment feature among Millennials on Venmo.
Research
Upon doing research, I quickly found my original assumption was NOT validated. BUT 100% of the research participants split food/beverage bills on Venmo so I decided to pivot and research users’ experiences with splitting food/beverage bills further. I found 12 out of 16 participants were frustrated by not having an easy way to see and split bills (especially uneven bills) on Venmo. From these new insights, I revised my problem statement.
Problem
Millennials need an easy way to split shared bills instantly on Venmo because it’s inefficient to do calculations outside Venmo and a slow process for everyone involved.
Impact
Using a human-centered approach, I designed an added feature for Millennials to easily split uneven shared bills on Venmo's mobile app. 5 out of 5 people I usability tested the feature with found it useful and convenient.
If this were a real life feature shipped, I would measure the success through KPIs like: how long it takes users to adopt the new feature upon learning about it, percentage of total active users using the new feature, how often key users engage with new feature (as intended), and how long users continue to use the new feature after learning about it.
Prototype
Feel free to interact with it!
Takeaways
It’s ok to make assumptions, but be open to letting go. Since I was frustrated with having to retype and recreate recurring WiFi and subscription payments with my roommate, I assumed that a good majority of users would also have similar frustrations, but through user research, my assumption was not validated. Although it was sad to have to let go of solving the recurring payment problem, I learned to let go and pivot.
Really listen to users. It can be easy to want to lead questions, especially when having assumptions or biases, but UX is about uncovering truths, not choosing what I want to hear to confirm my assumptions. Listening to users openly and objectively while reading in between the lines during research/testing, along with the lesson I learned above, will better guide me towards solving legitimate problems that have greater value to users and businesses.
Tripmate
