Venmo is a mobile payment service owned by PayPal. A free digital wallet, the app allows friends to make and share payments via mobile phone. This conceptual project proposes a new feature addition that incorporates optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scan and read line items on receipts. The resulting solution simplifies the bill-splitting experience by allowing users to claim and pay for items directly on their Venmo apps without the burden of manual input, manual calculation (tax and tip automatically computed), or over-reliance on third-party apps.
KEY TASKS
User Research
Product Roadmapping
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
KEY DESIGN TOOLS
Sketch
Illustrator
Photoshop
InVision
Fun fact: The Girl Scouts sold more cookies when they began to take mobile payments.
Source: Retail Dive.
one
background
"I'll venmo you"
No more IOUs. No more awkward fumbling of cash at the dinner table. The various peer-to-peer (P2P) payment needs — from returning ice cream money to a friend to sending rent to the roommate — fueled the birth of Venmo. Especially popular for the millennial generation, the app transacted roughly $12 billion in total payments in 2017. That’s a lot of Venmo-ing.
"What Venmo has done and the thing that makes Venmo unique is it’s not a payment transaction, it’s kind of an experience."
— Dan Schulman, PayPal CEO
two
problem space
swimming in a sea of sharks
Competition in the P2P space increases faster than ever. Strong competitors like Zelle, Apple Pay, and Square Cash continue to fight for more market share, and many new players are still coming in.
In order to stay competitive, Venmo has been working to scale and monetize. Their most recent project gave users the opportunity to pay over 2 million PayPal merchants across the States.
This new feature addition — the OCR receipt scanner — is a direct response to Venmo's initiatives to incorporate differentiated functionality on their service and add increased value for their consumers. It is also an effort to further simplify the experience of social money exchanges by consolidating splitting and payment efforts onto one platform.
three
Research
empathy research
In order to ensure that the subsequent design decisions made would be most relevant for the target user and both enjoyable and pleasurable to use, I conducted primary and secondary research with the following goals in mind:
- Understand the digital wallet and mobile payment market as well as Venmo’s market presence
- Obtain scope of competitors and other digital wallet apps and expense-splitting technologies
- Understand needs, goals, motives of Venmo users
- Learn about users’ views on digital wallets, mobile payment topics (e.g. security), expense-splitting tools, and other related pain points, needs, interests, and opinions
competitive analysis
In order to better understand the P2P landscape as well as guage whether existing products and solutions sufficiently address the needs of the target user, I conducted a competitive analysis of two separate competitor segments: digital wallet providers and expense splitting applications.
USER INTERVIEWS
I also interviewed six seasoned Venmo users in depth to learn about their personal P2P payment experiences and behaviors surrounding digital wallet and Venmo usage. Out of these interviews, I distilled the responses into three key takeaways that would shape the following ideation and design processes.
#1
Simplicity is key. New features need to be subtly integrated and unobstrusive to the existing flow.
#2
5/6 interviewees mentioned using the expense-splitting app, Splitwise. Partipants liked the various splitting options provided (e.g. by portion, percentage, share). Some also use it as a tracker for expenses.
#3
Communication matters. In the case someone accidentally claims or splits the wrong item, there must be visibility into who claimed what. A messaging platform would be helpful.
four
define, design
shaping the flow & crafting the screens
jobs to be done + persona
I chose to amalgamate these frameworks to define the behavior and habits of the target user and also systematically look for opportunities to create value.
Task Flow from lyndsay to friend
Task Flows from three perspectives
Bill-splitting, of course, is no one way street. These tasks flows (also a representative set of the low fidelity screens created) outline the three different ways the receipt scanning feature would be experienced and the resulting interactions from user to app to user. (Note: Lyndsay's friend will now be referred to as Joe for the duration of this project.)
five
prototype, Test
evaluating receipt scanner version 1.0
Five Venmo users within the millennial age range were recruited to test the a high fidelity, interactive InVision prototype. Each participant was given Lyndsay's context scenario (dinner with friends at Boiling Crab) and three separate tasks:
TASK #1: Participant is Lyndsay, the one who paid for the original bill. Participant creates the group expense and send out payment requests.
TASK #2: Participant is Lyndsay. A few days have passed. Participant checks who has not paid and sends reminders.
TASK #3: Participant is now Joe. Participants pays Lyndsay.
(Note: I switched tasks #2 and #3 from the original flow to minimize participant confusion from having to alternate between roles.)
six
insights & implications
improvement opportunites for verison 1.0
These four key insights retrieved from the usability tests informed a set of design implications that were crucial in driving the proceeding iterations.
#1
INSIGHT: Participants stated feeling overwhelmed by the number of items that suddenly appeared on the "Select Your Items" screen despite knowing that it is a digitized version of the receipt. They also did not know what action to first engage in upon arriving at the screen.
IMPLICATION 1: Incorporate conversational guides at the top to clarify purpose of each screen. Keep each cue focused on a single topic. This will also establish a more friendly tone (as if Venmo is a friend asking easy questions).
IMPLICATION 2: Provide more white space in between rows to break up text and allow the eye to breathe. Repeat across all screens to clean up the visual aesthetic.
#2
INSIGHT: In an effort to make the actions distinct, Version 1.0 separated item-claiming and splitting options by screen — the former on "Select Your Items" and the latter on "Tip & Payment Breakdown." However, participants did not understand how to split items and could not locate the action.
IMPLICATION: Consolidate claim and split actions to the same screen, specifically attached to their respective line items for visual proximity. Omit checkmark bubble to provide real estate.
#3
INSIGHT: When in the role of Lyndsay during the first flow (sending payment requests to friends), participants preferred seeing both their own individual expense as well as the overall expense of the bill (that they paid for in full).
IMPLICATION: Keep the original payment information on the breakdown screen for easy reference. Users should be not be expected to remember the details behind how much they paid for the overall bill, nor should they be made to open up the scanned image every time they wish to view this information.
#4
INSIGHT: Participants exhibited confusion over activating the receipt scanner due to the camera options provided. They saw "Scan Receipt" and "Take Photo" as redundant. (The photo taking option was initially created to allow users to take attach photos to their expenses such as a drink or a concert ticket. Attachments can be seen by their friends on their newsfeeds.) Upon further questioning, participants stated they did not find the need for this photography beyond receipts.
IMPLICATION: Simplify options to "Scan," "Upload," and "Cancel."
seven
final design
scan, claim, pay — at one time, in one spot
receipt scanner prototypes — version 2.0