App Critique: Venmo
15-day App Critique Challenge: day 5
About the “15-day App Critique Challenge”: for 15 days, I’m going to critique a popular web/mobile app each day, to improve my critical thinking skill.
For today’s critique, I have invited my classmate and friend Yejun, who is a talented designer who just graduated from UC-Berkeley School of Information.
Host: Jessie
Critique: Yejun
What do you think makes Venmo unique?
Yejun: What makes Venmo unique from other fintech apps is that it is friendship-based. For example, Paypal and Square are all individual-business models, while Venom is an individual-individual model.
The unique business model makes Venmo easily promoted among people, as new users could be acquired by friend referrals.
How does the design of Venmo align with its core values?
Yejun: When a user opens the app, the first page was neither profile nor account, but transaction activities among friends. This design aligns with its core value of “friend-based”, and it looks more like a social media app than a fintech app.
Also, the user could see a lot of emojis which make the app interactive and fun. Emojis are very common among social networking apps. There are other interactions such as comment or like, that further signify its “social” characteristic.
On the top, users could toggle between different transaction activity views: global, friends, and self. The default view is “friend” view, which also aligns with its core value about “knowing what your friends are up to”. Under this view, the user could see who his/her friends have interacted with recently, which reflects its core value about “expanding a person’s friend circle”.
Can you walk me through a user flow on Venmo?
Yejun: Assume I’m going to send the rent to my roommate.
The friends’ activities on the home page are not something I really care about. I open the app with the purpose of sending money, so I’m looking for the tab/window/button for it.
On the top navigation bar, I first see the hamburger menu icon and the toggle switches. Then I see a CTA on the right that looks like “pay for bills”. I’m assuming this is the button I need to click to send money.
Upon tapping I see a popout window for selecting a friend to pay or request money. There are two ways to find a friend: search or scan QR code. I think they are very convenient features. Below these two ways of finding a friend, the app recommends top people to me. I’m assuming the ranking is based on transaction history. This is also very handy for the user to speed up the process of finding a friend.
I quickly locate my roommate’s name from top people list, I even don’t need to search or scan, just need 1-tap, which is convenient.
Upon tapping her name I was redirected to the 1-tap “pay or request” page.
The page is very concise. I can enter the amount of money right next to my roommate’s name, and tap either pay or request.
At the right bottom corner, I see the visibility of this transaction and it is by default “public”. This is disturbing to me because I don’t want to show my transaction history to everyone using Venmo. So I will change it to Private.
Though this visibility indicator has a link style design and has the accordance of tappable, I think people might still miss it and go ahead make the transaction without knowing their activities will be public. I would prefer to change the default visibility to either private or friends. But I’m concerned about if changing the default transaction visibility will conflict Venmo’s business goal. So it’s better to understand more about the core values before making design changes.
Conclusion: a reflection from Jessie
I’m not a frequent user of Venmo because I think the core values and the main feature of this app is confusing to me. In most of the scenarios, users open Venmo to pay or request money, but the social media design style blurred its core feature. However, “expanding a person’s friend circle by viewing his/her friends’ activities with friends’ friends” is a really interesting idea and I want to know how the app will evaluate the effectiveness of this design.
On the other hand, Venmo makes pay and request money from friends very easy with just a few taps. It doesn’t have complicated authentication steps so people can finish a transaction within a few seconds. The “default public” transaction visibility turned transactions into social media feeds and reduced “security concerns” from users. In this way, people might be more open to making e-transactions between friends.