Friends and Anarchy in App Design

When I first tried Venmo, I was terrified by the ease and speed with which I could send money. Where were the triple-confirm safety checks? The “cancel transaction” button, the 2-day transfer holding period? This wasn’t at all like a bank transfer with impenetrable steel walls between myself and my transaction.

Well… Eventually I realized that was kind of the point. Venmo is designed for friends — not for a transaction with a faceless commerce company or an open community of strangers. The simple difference in who it’s built for dramatically changes how tightly controlled the experience is. Venmo doesn’t feel like you’re swiping your card, getting a printout to review, and signing the receipt. It feels like you’re handing your friend $20.

There’s a higher level of anarchy where there is a higher level of trust.

We ended up taking the same approach designing the messaging experience at Dasher:

• Messages can be edited or deleted after they’ve been sent. In essence, this rewrites history. In other situations, this would be a crazy liability — but for friends, this helps you express what you really wanted to say, clean up mistakes, and have more meaningful conversations.
• Everyone in a chat has full “administrative” rights. Anyone in a chat can rename the group, add users, or kick people out. This is a lot simpler from a user’s POV and gets rid of hairy edge cases and bureaucracy — but it only works because there is a high level of trust among groups. (Incidentally, this also helped us learn and improve our UX early on, when someone accidentally disbanded a chatroom of 30+ people)

When designing the rules to govern our app, it’s been really worth looking at the specific users and trying hard to ignore dogma that might come from similar-seeming apps with different targets.

(photo credit: Ted Van Pelt)