For college students, Venmo is one of our most frequently used apps – from Target runs, to dinner hangouts, or flea market adventures, Venmo is a quick way for us to transfer and receive money. Splitting bills is one of the most common uses of Venmo, but we noticed that Venmo didn't offer as much techniques to aid this process and wanted to see how we could help with this.
Despite bill splitting being a common flow on Venmo, there is no easily discoverable feature that helps us calculate these costs. In our initial user testing, we discovered that a majority of users were unaware of Venmo’s split bill feature. 75% of users went outside of the Venmo app and used their phone’s calculator to determine costs and requested money from their friends one-by-one.
We conducted an app audit to observe why the split bill calculation feature was not well-known amongst Venmo users, as well as if there were any other issues that impeded users' interaction with this feature. Here’s what we concluded:
The Unaware
The Aware
After scoping out how Venmo’s current split bill feature works, we quickly brainstormed a few ways to improve this flow. We ultimately created an A/B version to compare and observe which design our users would prefer.
We created two different flows - Flow A closely resembled the current flow for bill splitting whereas Flow B introduced a receipt scan function.
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Here, we focused on making it more obvious to users that they could select more than one recipient per transaction by preventing the screen from automatically redirecting and having users manually click the "Next" button to move on. We also changed the flow of bill splitting so that users could add the total first, and then input how much each person owes.
— Positive reaction to learning they had the option to add more than one person to a transaction.
— Wish they could input custom splits.
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This flow shared the same approach to adding multiple recipients, but introduced a more ambitious receipt scan functionality to aid bill splitting. Our user interviews revealed that users value the efficiency of transferring money via Venmo, so we explored whether taking a quick snap of one's receipt could make this bill splitting more convenient. This flow allows users to visually see the prices of items and assign recipients to certain items to calculate how much each recipient should send.
— Found receipt scanning intriguing and liked that they were able to factor in taxes
— Liked how they could create custom, uneven splits
— Felt like there were too many clicks, and wish process could be condensed
Taking into consideration user insights, we included options for users to make custom or even requests. This flow closely aligns with Venmo's current process to keep things familiar, but still allowing users to calculate bill splitting within the app.
Flow B explores a receipt scan to speed up the process of splitting uneven bills. Instead of users having to mentally take note of what different people owe them, the receipt scan allows users to directly divide the bill and visualize which items each person should pay.
We conducted A/B testing on our two prototypes on 4 users.
— Liked the familiar layout.
— Allowed them to reach the “What’s it for?” screen where they input the money amount to be sent/requested in less than 2 clicks. Since Venmo’s appeal is the speed of money transfers, more clicks may take away from this for some users.
As my team was doing our final round of user testing to examine which prototype was preferred, we were shocked to discover that many people chose Flow A over Flow B. We thought receipt scanning was surely a feature that users would be enticed by (and they were), but sometimes the new and grand isn’t always what is needed. When you spend a lot of time crafting a design, it’s natural that you want it to be praised. However, this all goes to show that gaining user insights is always essential because what users want might be different from what you want – and that’s okay because what makes design so exciting is that it’s always surprising.