IntroDPD Pre-Test: dz99, Danielle Zeller
Discover: How do you use Venmo?
Venmo is used in almost every person’s daily routine; whether it’s splitting a meal, grabbing coffee, or sharing a birthday present, the idea of cash at the tip of your fingers has changed the way we as humans spend money. With instantaneous access to a bank account, sharing money has become accessible and easy. There are, however, ways to improve the functionality of Venmo through its design without changing the app’s core values and uses.
I find that when I open my phone to use Venmo, I am normally in a rush. If I am at a restaurant and I need to Venmo my friend $15 for dinner, I want to have a simple, fast experience using the app. But most of the time, I find myself forgetting to write a caption or sometimes clicking pay instead of request. This is more a design-error rather than a human-error — I know how to use the app, but when I am in a rush, I don’t always see the value of writing a caption.
My pain point: Venmo’s lack of shortcuts for quick captions during a transaction.
Several students on Cornell’s campus share this pain. Most students are using Venmo when they forget their wallets at home or have no cash to pay back a friend. With the iPhone being a staple in our daily routines, apps are the easiest ways to perform daily tasks. Individuals want to be able to quickly pay someone, and the “insert caption” part of a transaction adds complexity to the action. Another major pain point: hitting pay instead of request. Many students expressed frustration with their tendency to hit “pay”. Since the pay button is used more than the request button, the tendency to default to hitting pay is much higher, even in situations when you know that you should be requesting money from a friend. Distinguishing between these two buttons is another design-error that Venmo should work to improve.
Define: Solving The Problem (Caption This!)
I believe the biggest issue at hand is having to write a caption for all Venmo transactions. When observing the ways in which people use Venmo, I saw that many of my friends would hit pay/request before writing a caption. This error can be fixed by simply changing the design of the app, or requiring no caption at all. But, if no caption was required, Venmo users would lose the ability to know why they are paying others. Venmo taps into our mental models of checks, and when we write checks, we like to remember the reason the check is being written.
People Problem Format: When I pay someone on Venmo, I want to do it easily and quickly, so I can spend less time participating in a transaction and thinking of an appropriate or sometimes funny caption. But I can’t do this because: 1. Venmo requires each user to input a caption with a payment (for requesting and paying) 2. To access any type of shortcut, I must click the smiley face above request/pay, and the four options are: beer cup emoji, money emoji, floaty emoji, and a rocket pop emoji. 3. The process of writing a caption takes too much time (considering the purpose of Venmo to be a fast-cash alternative).
Develop: Venmo Quick-Cap
The solution lies in a maintaining a sleek, simplistic design while adding more features for an effortless experience on the app. Venmo should not remove the requirement of a caption, but instead should focus on creating shortcuts that allow users to minimize their time writing captions. Some possible solutions are: adding an emoji bar to quickly pick a corresponding emoji to the purpose of the transaction, adding word shortcuts for writing captions, or even adding a feature where Venmo uses the time and location to propose reasons for Venmo (i.e. if you are at a restaurant at 6pm, Venmo will suggest “Dinner”).

One option: Emoji Bar
I think the best solution to improving the Venmo app is creating an quick-word bar that allows quick access to commonly used words for Venmo transactions. Based on the seasonal activities, the word bar should feature words that the majority of Venmo users are using. For example, lots of people are participating in fantasy football drafts before the season kicks off, so one of the words for the end of the summer would be “football.” The bar will be designed with hope that Venmo users will use a preset word for quicker transactions instead of having to type out a caption.
Deliver

Present
In trying to figure out how to improve the design of the Venmo app, I found that research played an integral role in understanding why individuals find frustrations in certain designs. My own experience using the app differed from several of the users I interviewed — they experienced frustrations with pay/request, as well as internal transaction problems. However, I found that the addition of a simple quick-word toolbar would significantly improve the effortlessness and fluidity of Venmo’s use. My solution works to limit human blame and frustration with forgetting to write a caption. All apps and web-pages track human psych scores — a positive or negative score that reflects the user’s interaction/experience. When this box pops up:

a user’s psych score lowers since they become less engaged in an app. By adding a simple caption toolbar, Venmo can minimize the chances of a declining psych score for each user.
I spent a few days gathering research on how my friends were using Venmo before pinning down on the part of the design that needed improvement. Before I started thinking about my own difficulties with the app, I had observed that several people were concerned with the pay/request button in addition to having to write a caption. I spent a day debating which issue I found more important, and decided that the best way to optimize a user’s experience on the app would be to minimize the number of required inputs. The overall project took me about four days, as I wanted to keep my ideas fresh and build on my observations of other users.