Bill Splitting with Venmo

An addition to Venmo's existing interface that makes one of the most common user tasks even easier.

Mobile IOS

Speculative Design

Overview

Why isn't this easier?

Venmo and apps like it have created a new norm for how friends split expenses. People no longer put down 5 cards and write down their amounts on the back of receipts, more likely one person puts down a card and says “just Venmo me later” and everyone obliges.

Despite this, Venmo doesn’t have a feature that allows users to share expenses between friends (ie splitting a check for dinner, splitting multiple checks from a night out, splitting expenses for a group vacation).

Existing features

Venmo's current solution to bill splitting

The app has a couple of different solutions to problems users face while splitting bills, but these features are little-known and have meaningful gaps in functionality

Screenshot of the split purchase feature

Split Purchase

If purchases are made using a Venmo card or by linking your Venmo to a third-party app (like paying for take out with Grubhub), users will see a CTA to Split Purchase.

Pain Points



Only available to people who use Venmo to pay for a service.



Users must split the charge evenly and can't add custom amounts



Appears to only be available for a window of time after the purchase is made.

Adding Multiple People

When a user creates a new request, they're prompted to add a recipient. Once a recipient is chosen, they're taken to the Pay or Request screen, but if a user clicks the recipient they can add more people to the charge.

Pain Points



Users need to go backwards in the flow to add additional recipients, and it's unclear that this feature is available.



Users can only put in the amount they want to charge each person, which means they still need to do math outside the app.



All recipients must be charged the same amount, users are unable to customize the amount charged per recipient without making a new request.

request with one recipient

request with Multiple recipients

Problem

How might we improve the experience of splitting expenses using Venmo?

Process



Research

Discovering how users to split expenses and what their common frustrations are.



Strategize

Translating research findings into meaningful and intuitive solutions.



Design

Integrating the new feature seamlessly into Venmo's exisitng UI.



Test

Using a prototype ton test viability and discover pain points.



Revise

Changing designs to solve for pain points discovered during user testing.

Research

What happens before a Venmo request is sent?

Users have been solving this problem in their own ways since the app was launched, so I wanted to find out more about how they split expenses, what works for them, and what doesn't.

Methodologies



Competitive Analysis

Discovering how competitors are solving similar problems.



Surveys

Determining how well Venmo's current features are working and how users feel about Venmo overall.



Interviews

Taking a deep-dive into how people use Venmo to split transactions and all of the steps surrounding that.

Research Goals



Discover if people are aware of and use Venmo’s purchase splitting feature.



Understand how users feel about Venmo’s existing feature and any pain points they experience using it.



Understand the common circumstances in which people are splitting expenses.



Understand how users currently split expenses.



Determine pain points users experience when splitting expenses.



Understand how similar apps and websites address this issue.

Competitive Analysis

Looking to competitors for inspiration

I conducted a competitive analysis of apps that allow users to split expenses and send money to one another.

Finding summary

View of the survey sent to participants

Survey

Gaining a broad understanding

I conducted a survey with 20 participants who used Venmo to gain insights on how many know about/use Venmo’s current features, what their thoughts are on it, and how they typically split expenses.

Survey Results

95%

of respondents had not used Venmo's Split Purchase feature

75% of participants had not been aware that the feature existed prior to taking the survey. 60% of participants also did not know multiple people could be added to a new request.

60%

of respondents said they used Venmo to split restaurant bills

Rent was the second most comment expense mentioned by respondents (35%).

85%

of respondents frequently used Venmo to split expenses

30% of respondents chose the top of the scale, indicating they used Venmo very frequently for this purpose.



What respondents LIKE about splitting expenses with Venmo



Easy to send/request money



Don’t have to split between cards or use cash



Less awkward than asking for money



Quicker than splitting other ways



People more reliably pay you back



What respondents DISLIKE about splitting expenses with Venmo



Requires someone doing the math



Time consuming



Forgetting who owes who what and how things should be divided



Sending the same request to different people



Relies heavily on communication

Interviews

Understanding the process behind a request

I conducted interviews with three participants who use Venmo weekly to split expenses. The goal of the interviews were to understand how they use Venmo to split expenses, what pain points they currently encounter, and their familiarity with Venmo’s current features.

"The hard part is figuring out how much to charge people, not actually charging them."

Participant 1

"It’s so much easier to put down one card and Venmo everyone, and so much less work for the server."

Participant 2

"I feel like I’m paying a social cost for insisting stuff gets divided evenly."

Participant 3

Interview Results



Participant Likes



Having an easy way to to send and request money.



Being able to delay the administrative work of splitting a bill until after the social event.



Not needing to deal with cash.



Creating less work for the servers at restaurants.



Not having to hunt people down for their share of the bill.



Being able to split expenses based on what everyone got (intead of dividing the end total evenly)



Participant Dislikes



Having to do "administrative work" to divide shared expenses.



Having to switch between apps to figure out how to devidie up expenses.



Remembering the amounts to charge each person.



Sending the same request to multiple people.



Having to talk with people to figure out who owed what.



Figuring out how to split up tax & tip.

Key insights

Users Love Information

Users expect to have a lot of information on the space before booking (capacity, amenities/equipment, cost what the span can/cannot be used for, etc.) and are frustrated when this information is missing, hard to find, or inconsistent.

Users Know What They're Looking For

When people are looking for a space to rent, they are usually booking for a specific reason and know the requirements the space needs to meet. They like when there are ways to narrow their search to spaces that meet these needs.

Nothing Can Replace a Point of Contact

Users expect to have a point of contact for the reservation even if they book online. They like when this contact is helpful and communicative, but not when they are hard to reach.

Let the Website Do the Hard Work

The more that the website is able to provide users, the less work a coordinator will have to do to provide a similar service.

Key Takeaways



The Existing Features Aren't Enough

Venmo users aren’t aware of or don’t use Venmo's existing features to help users split payments.



Users Are Doing the Heavy Lifting

While users almost exclusively use Venmo for splitting expenses, almost all of them have to do some kind of work outside the app before sending a request.



Spending Less Time Thinking About Money

Users value quickness and appreciates that Venmo lets them postpone the “administrative work” of splitting a bill until after the social interaction.



The Social Cost of Accuracy

Some users noted they preferred to split things exactly, but felt self conscious asking their friends to do that.

Strategize

Bringing users methods into Venmo

With a better understanding of user needs and project challenges, I began to strategize about how users would move through the website and what information architecture made the most sense for the client's content.

Personas

Our Venmo requester

Based on insights gained from the research phase, I wanted to create a persona based on people who were very money conscious. My thinking here was that if I designed for the most concerned user, users that were worried less with exactness would still get a lot out of the features.

Theo Green

Bartender • New York, NY

He's the kind of guy who likes to stay on top of his personal finances. Because he doesn’t make a lot of money and lives in a pretty expensive city, he likes to know where every dollar goes to ensure he’s managing his money well.

Goals/Needs



To have control over his finances



To have a quick, easy, and exact way to share bills with friends



To not have to coordinate individual charges over text

Frustrations/Fears



Worried people will judge him for splitting bills exactly



Frustrated that he always has to do math when splitting bills



Worried he’s losing money when things are split equally

USer Flow

Illustrating the new request process

When designing the user flow I wanted to make sure users at all levels of money consciousness could use the feature.
‍
This turned into two adjacent flows, one path where a user could split one total among many people, and one where they could scan their receipt and assign people to items.

Lo-fi wireframes

Layouts that guide the user

To make sure my designs were consistent with Venmo's existing interface, I developed my low fidelity wireframes with a combination of screenshots and wireframe elements.

Design

Expanding on existing UI

My challenge in the design phase was how to make a new feature with a lot of never-before-designed elements look like it had always been a part of Venmo's UI.

Visual Design

Digging into the source material

My first step toward rendering my wireframes in more high-fidelity was to take a look at all of Venmo's existing UI. I took screenshots of every new page I could find on my own Venmo and used their website as another point of reference.

HI-fi wireframes

Keeping everything on brand

Based on insights gained from the research phase, I created two personas that represent two possible users of the reservation feature.

Test

Determining usefulness and effectiveness

Once I finished a high-fidelity prototype of the feature, I wanted to test it with Venmo users to see how intuitive the features were and if they solved the target issues.

View of the MAze test results dashboard

User Testing

Do the new features solve this old problem?

I conducted an unmoderated usability test with 8 participants using Maze that focused on the room reservation process and overall impression of the site.

Test objectives



Is the feature intuitive?

Determine if users can complete essential flows in the new feature.



Where are the pain points?

Discover any areas where users get frustrated or confused.



Would people use it?

Discover how useful test participants find the features and if they would use them.

Affinity map of participant feedback and observations

test Results

100%

of testers were able to complete all assigned tasks

7.5 out of 10 was the average of how testers rated their overall experience using the features

Successes

90%

of testers said they would use the Split Total feature

The remaining 10% indicated the would "maybe" use the feature

"This feature is awesome! I'd definitely use it - it's more convenient and would save time, especially when trying to split an amount between a large group of friends."

Tester 7

100%

of testers were able to use the Split Total feature with minimal or no errors

"It's so much easier than doing the math myself"

Tester 6

70%

of testers said they would use the Itemize feature

10% said they would "maybe" use the feature, 20% said they would not

"I definitely prefer this to going through the bill at the table with friends and remembering what we got, it'd be much easier to claim what we each got through this feature. "

Tester 2

Improvements

70%

of testers had trouble adding a tip to their scanned receipt

"When adding the tip, I did not know where to press at first. I was immediately looking for a '+' sign or the word "add" somewhere but couldn't find it. "

Tester 4

60%

of testers had trouble identifying the "Share" button as a way to send out the bill for others to claim items

"I was hesitant to press 'share' because I didn't want to send out the bill without charging everyone."

Tester 2

Revise

Adjusting for a more intuitive experience

User testing revealed that a lot of participants would be interested in using the new features, but that they had trouble on a few key points in the flow.

Priority Revision

Adding a tip to the receipt

Pain Point

User testing showed that after users scanned their receipt, they found it difficult to locate the tip section of the bill and weren’t sure how to add a tip.

Solution

Since this is something users will have to add often, they shouldn’t have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to add a tip. I added an additional screen after the user takes a photo of their receipt that allows users to easily add a tip, which doubles as a tip calculator for common percentages.

Before

After

Priority Revision

Sharing an itemized request

Conclusion