Enhancing User Experience on Google Pay
In the recent years, adoption of payment apps have been on the rise with many big players entering this space — Google (Google Pay), Apple (Apple Pay), Meta (WhatsApp Payments). People prefer digital payments over cash as it is convenient, secure, and easier to track, amongst other reasons.
As more people use these apps on their phones, it becomes important for firms to provide a seamless mobile experience to ensure people continue to use their apps.
Google Pay (GPay), as we all know, is a popular payments app that lets us transfer/receive money using our phone number, UPI ID, QR code, etc. We are going to focus on be GPay, understand its payment features, and how it can be improved to provide a better user experience.
When we open GPay, most of us broadly see the below screens as we scroll through the app (there may be differences based on the phone, app version, etc.)
GPay, similar to other apps, offers users multiple modes of payment — QR, saved contact, phone number, UPI, etc. All these modes of payment can be seen as features at the top the screen.
We tried to map these features to different use cases for Person to Person (P2P) and Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions below (the text in green represents information available, while the text in red represents information that isn’t readily available to us while making a payment):
For the first four use cases, we can directly click on the feature we want to use and proceed to transfer money. However, for the last two use cases outlined in yellow, the interaction is a bit different and that is what we are about to discuss!
As a user, if I want to pay someone I’ve transacted with in the past, I first need to find the person on the app. The only information I have that will help me find the person is my memory of our past transaction.
Use Case: As a user, I want to view and/or pay an individual/localized merchant I’ve transacted with in the past quickly, when I have limited context on past transaction history.
Current User Journey: Currently, if we want to pay an individual/localized merchant we have transacted with in the past, we need to look at the People/Businesses sections respectively and click on each contact to look for the transaction and confirm if that is the contact we are looking for. However, when we first open the app, we only see seven contacts under People and three contacts under Businesses in the order of recent transactions. If we want to view more contacts, we need to click on ‘More’ and when we do that, the rest of the list populates on the same screen. We then need to scroll through the list to find the contact and transaction we are looking for.
As we pay more people/merchants, the lists keep getting longer and we need to keep scrolling to find the contact and transaction, which is definitely time consuming and cumbersome. In all likelihood, we may miss finding the contact and transaction in such long lists!
Pain Point 1: Endless scrolling to find the individual/localized merchant the user is looking for, leading to a time consuming and poor user experience.
Pain Point 2: Limited context (name and photo only) available to find past transactions.
Pain Point 3: Cannot easily find a past transaction when the user only remembers the date of transaction and/or amount transacted
Based on the above pain points, it is evident that the current GPay design assumes the user has complete context of the person/merchant they have transacted with in the past. However, this always isn’t the case. Users remember different aspects of past transactions, which we have discussed in the following scenarios:
- Scenario 1: A colleague and I go out for lunch on a Monday afternoon and we decide to split the bill. He pays for lunch and I decide to pay him back later. We both forget about this and two weeks later, when I’m at home having dinner, I remember that I haven’t paid him yet. I decide to pay him using GPay, but I don’t have his contact saved on my phone. However, I remember him paying me a couple of months ago on GPay, so I open the app and search for his name using the search bar. If I get his spelling right, I’d be able to find him quickly. However, if I don’t get the right spelling, I’ll start looking for him under ‘People’ category. Since I know his name and face (obviously), I scroll through the list of people to find him. As the last transaction was two months ago, I need to scroll through a long list to find him. This is a time consuming and irritating process for me.
- Scenario 2: As I am walking down the street, I notice a vendor selling fresh vegetables and I decide to buy. As expected, the vendor has a QR code and I scan the code to make the payment. At the end of the month, while tallying my monthly expenses, I am off by some amount. I remember paying the vendor earlier this month, but I don’t remember the exact date and amount. In order to verify my expense, I open the app and now have to scroll through the ‘Businesses’ category to identify the vendor. I don’t remember the name or face, hence I’ll need to literally scroll through the list and every time I think it might be someone, I need to click on the contact and check if the transaction I was looking for is in there, which is definitely not a good experience for me.
- Scenario 3: I remember receiving a sum of money on GPay a while ago, but I don’t remember who I received it from and when exactly it was transferred. I roughly remember it was some time last week, but not sure of the exact date. I’ll need to open the app and search for the transaction under ‘People/Businesses’ categories by clicking on each contact I think it might be from, until I find it. Definitely a cumbersome process.
- Scenario 4: I want to view all the transactions I’ve made last week, but there is currently no direct way for me to do so, except to look for transactions within each contact under ‘People’ or ‘Businesses’. This exercise would further get frustrating if my time period was a month or two months, and not one week.
All the above scenarios show how users may remember different aspects of a transaction and there needs to be a way for users to find the people or transactions they are looking for easily, based on what they know.
To provide users with a good experience, we first need to identify the different aspects of a transaction a user might remember. From the above scenarios, we can see that:
- For scenario 1, the user remembered the name and rough time period when the transaction was made.
- For scenario 2, the user remembered the context of the transaction (vegetable vendor), but not the name or exact date.
- For scenario 3, the user remembered the transaction amount and the rough time period, but not the name or exact date.
- For scenario 4, the user knew the time period he wanted to see the transactions for, but not the name or amount.
Broadly, users remember the name, date/time period, context, or transaction amount. Using this information, we shall attempt to solve for the pain points identified above.
Solution: Introduce a feature that enables users search for past transactions or people they have transacted with in the past quickly based on the information they remember (name, date/time period, context, or transaction amount).
To build the feature, we first need to identify which parameters amongst name, date/time period, context, and transaction amount are most likely to help users search for past transactions or people.
Based on the above analysis, we believe the following parameters would improve user experience:
- Recency — List of all transactions ordered by recency (most recent at the top)
- By Month — List of all transactions from the beginning to the end of the month, as chosen by the user
- By Category — List of all transactions that fall under a particular business category. This parameter will help in case of P2M transactions. We can leverage the Merchant Category Code (MCC) and enable users choose the category they want to view the transactions for. We can continue to keep the P2P transactions, which currently don’t have a similar categorization as P2M under a separate category called ‘Personal Transactions’.
We believe that with the addition of this new feature, the People and Businesses categories in the current GPay app become obsolete and can be removed.
Updated User Journey:
Future Improvements: One of the potential improvements in future can be to enable users categorize their P2P transactions (similar to MCC for P2M transactions). When users are on the payments page, they can quickly tag the payment to a particular category (defined by them) and eventually use that category to filter out transactions in the ‘By Category’ tab. This information helps users identify areas where they are transacting (spending) most, and eventually provides the potential to solve personal expense management use cases on GPay!
