Venmo: Design Patterns and Flows
Hi, I’m Tess Arthur. I’m a social media marketer and I’m on a journey to learn more about UX Design. I’m enrolled in the DesignLab UX Academy boot camp (Weingart cohort). I’ll be posting on Medium as I follow the course, and look forward to sharing my journey and hearing more of your thoughts!
Venmo is a free application that allows you to pay and request money from friends. I’ve been using this app for the past few years almost a couple times a week to share the cost of meals, groceries, and much more. Since I don’t like to carry cash (and neither do many of my friends) the ability to transfer cash using an app is the ideal situation.
As an avid and frequent user of Venmo, one of my primary flows in the app is sending or requesting a payment to or from a peer. After onboarding, the task flow is very simple.
Venmo’s design patterns are pretty standard. They use a slide-out, hamburger style menu where you can easily find anything you’re looking for within the app, including incomplete transactions and the ability to transfer a balance to your bank. Searching a person or scanning a code is another way to initiate the primary task of sending or requesting money.
Overall, the minimal appearance and minimal number of actions available to users in-app make the experience of using Venmo very pleasant. On top of that, if you want to see who someone is dating or what your friend did last week, simply scroll through your Venmo feed and see it. This feature makes the app not only a payment app, but a social experience. This unique social experience only drives user engagement, making the service become even more force of habit for users.
