Add a Feature
My third assignment for the Miami UX/UI Ironhack bootcamp was to add a feature to a pre-existing app, one that would add value and create a better experience for our users. My group, Team Cali Girls, consisting of myself and Tania Gandarillas, chose Venmo as our app for this project.
Our first step was to do some preliminary research on Venmo to determine who and what the company was. Through our research we determined that Venmo is one of the most used peer to peer cash payment apps, with over 52 million active accounts, and was voted one of the top digital wallets on the market. Armed with this knowledge, we asked ourselves,
“how can we add value to such a successful app?”
We began to answer this question by diving into our Design Thinking Process. Our first step was creating a Lean UX Canvas to reveal some business and user goals. We found a potential problem to be that Venmo is not currently the top voted P2P payment app and a benefit could be increasing revenue and user retention rate. On the user side we profiled our users as people who are social and don’t often carry cash and that some potential benefits could be social validation and ease of use.
From there we began looking at Venmo’s competitors, and created a Competitive Feature Analysis chart to see how venmo measured up against the competition.
The Competitive Feature Analysis revealed that many cash payment apps offered similar services. What stood out to us was that Venmo is currently the only P2P app that has a social feed. As we were adding a feature we decided to pursue this aspect, as proved by further research, we found that the social aspect is something our users value.
Once we determined our competition, we made a Market Positioning Chart to further understand their relation to each other on a predetermined X and Y axis chart. We measured app complexity versus social elements of the apps. We found our Blue Ocean opportunity to be an app with a higher complexity and more social capabilities and saw where there was room in the marketplace for potential growth.
Our next step was to focus on who our users were. We conducted user research by collecting 40 surveys and completing 5 interviews.
Some top quantitative data showed that:
- Venmo is our users preferred P2P cash payment app
- 80 % of our users like or are indifferent to a social feed
- 65 % of our users use the app to pay family or friends
From our interviews we collected quotes that provided some strong qualitative data:
“I probably say ‘venmo me’ a couple times a week”
“My entire Venmo feed consists of paying for brunch, booze, and food.”
“Venmo makes things easier when going out with friends because there’s more assurance in many different senses.”
We took our qualitative and quantitative data and broke it down into pieces. We organized and categorized our findings and began to notice themes and trends emerging.
The Affinity Map revealed several trends within our data. The two that stood out to us were the social aspect of Venmo and the pain points around splitting bills.
After further discussing our users we came up with a User Persona to represent our collected data.
With Dakota in mind we created an As-Is Scenario, showing the action, thoughts and feelings behind planning an evening out with her friends.
This process aided us in creating a User Journey Map which helped us dive deeper into the pains and gains of her experience as well as highliting opporutnities.
The lowest pain points for our user were:
- That the split bill option malfunctioned in her Uber app
- That she didn’t properly keep track of all her expenditures from the previous night
- That she didn’t want to have to hound her friends to pay her back
This brought us to defining the biggest issues for our user and helped us to create our three problem statements:
Our user is bothered and agitated because she wants to split a payment without switching from app to app all night
Our user is unsure and indecisive about how to keep track of multiple bills throughout a night out with her friends
Our user is anxious and full of dread about having to calculate and request money after a long night out with her friends
From here we began the ideation process and discussed the various ways we could add value to our product. By changing our statements into How Might We questions we set ourselves up for a successful brainstorming session.
How Might We…
…help our user easily split multiple payments on one platform?
…help our user keep track of multiple bills between friends throughout her night?
…help our user efficiently calculate and request payment amounts from friends to alleviate her anxiety?
After brainstorming various solutions we implemented the MoSCow Method to filter our ideas through the Won’t, Should, Could and Would have sections of the chart. This allowed us to discover our must have features for our final product.
Next we used a Value Proposition Canvas to match the products and services side of our business to our users. We created pain relievers and gain creators to improve our user experience by adding value — such as ‘eliminating the risk of not getting paid back’ and ‘taking away the negative social consequences such as being perceived as being petty.’
We determined our Minimum Viable Product:
a feature that allows users to split payments between friends throughout a period of time by creating a social group tab system that tracks, calculates, and requests payment amounts from friends for that social event.
Once we completed the Ideation stage it was time to start developing and delivering our product. We hand drew a Low-Fi prototype of our app, testing it on 6 users to see if it was clear and concise and easy to follow.
We input our prototype into Maze and were able to see how our users responded to the app through various metrics and heatmaps.
With our test results in mind we started to create a Mid-Fi prototype in Figma. The Mid-Fi protoype included the layout and options that we were hoping to bring to our final Hi-Fi product.
We once again took to Maze to test our prototype. Our testing was overwhelimingly positive with a 100% success rate and and an average of 4.6 seconds spent on each page. Our users found the prototype to be intuitive and easy to follow.
Once we gathered our user feedback we started creating our Hi-Fi app in Figma. We took screenshots of existing pages in Venmo and started builiding our app mimicking their color scheme, text and design perfectly. We built a ‘split’ button and added a ‘group’ option to the feed menu. What follows is our interactive prototype:
Our next steps will be to test the Hi-Fi prototype to see how we can improve. A key takeaway for this project was not to get stuck on user research. As we had such a successful product to start with, we hit a wall early on in trying to define the problem. Once we distilled our data we were able to see trends emerge that ultimately led us to our finished product. This was a challenging yet rewarding exercise. The more I utilize the tools in the Design Thinking Process the easier I find it to design effectively.
*All images were used for student purposes only
