Designing for Good
Venmo would like to introduce a way for people to send money to causes they care about. For example, a nonprofit that provides clean sources of water purification or a specific Kickstarter campaign.
User Research (5 in-depth interviews and 40 survey responses) revealed that a large factor of giving is visibility into the specifics of the donation. Or as one user bluntly explained,
“I want to know where my money’s going!”
Our research helped us identify our true problem: create a quick way for users to discover charities, and give to specific projects. This design should fit right into Venmo’s current ecosystem and make donating simple and pain-free.
Our primary user persona (a newly hired millennial) would land in-app and look to either: A) discover a charity to give to or B) notice friends giving to a non-profit he cares about.
We Incorporated Venmo’s current navigational patterns to bring users into a new but similar ecosystem. This will encourage discovery in the same way Venmo’s current interface does for friends’ transactions.
Our team focused on creating a new environment centered around transparent giving incorporating Venmo’s current navigational patterns, business objectives and ecosystem.
Focusing primarily on, charity discovery , familiarity and ease of use.
Project Drop-downs: Provide potential donors with a basic understand of what their donation will accomplish
Project breakdowns and Preset Donations: Provide further information about the project user will donate to. Preset donations make donating simple and easy.
Cognitive reward: Sound and Light animation screen reinforces user's action.
We used Sketch and Invision to create an interactive prototype for the “discovery” and “social feed discovery” flows. The prototype leads a user through discovery to donation.
By focusing our solution on reducing constraints to charitable giving, we’ve created a viable solution for Venmo to help its users expand beyond its normal functions. We presented our insights and working prototypes to an audience comprised largely of UX design peers, where the discovery and preset donation features were very well received.
Through research and design we chose to emphasize our efforts solely on Venmo users.In future iterations we would like to focus on a solution that works best for charities and how our features can benefit both donors and charities.
For this being my first foray into managing a team of designers I very proud of our solution, team work, and deliverables. Moving forward I would push my team to spend more time in research to uncover a different solution.
I'm ready, are you?
