📝How We Identified The Problem
What we learned from 40 surveys and 15 interviews:
Users love the convenience of sending money with Venmo, but crave security and legitimacy when paying small businesses.
Users are concerned about unclear payment confirmation.
Users are concerned about lack of two-way communication.
Users are concerned with lack of digital receipt.
Users are often unsure if they paid the correct person.
Key Insight: Venmo is missing the structure and trust signals that small businesses and their customers need for smooth, reliable transactions.
A digestible version of my affinity mapping
💡 Patching Up Pain Points through Ideation
To guide our designs, we focused on three things:
- Providing security and verification through receipts, a cart system, and a vendor agreement.
- Making small businesses more discoverable and official through a customizable Storefront and search.
- Making customers feel confident that a vendor is trustworthy and legit through customer reviews and a vendor's customizable Storefront.
Hopefully you can make out what I sketched
🌊 The User Flow in the Low-Fidelity Screens
Guide yourself through how the user flow goes. It'll explain itself (LITERALLY).
↩️ Design Iterations and Pivots
Before making it to the final product, there were design adjustments we made for the right reasons:
- Instead of replacing the Cards page in the nav bar, we used a home page feed toggle so that we balance business priorities while making Storefronts discoverable, similar to TikTok’s approach.
- Initially Storefronts felt like plain profiles, so we added customizable banners, leveraging existing Venmo features to add character and familiarity.
- Receipts originally included Venmo's social indicators (likes and comments), but we removed them to free up space and focus attention on the receipt itself.
🔍 Discovering Storefronts
Discovering storefronts is now just one swipe away. Browse vendors nearby then switch back to friends using the mode switcher at the top.
- Then select the vendor that catches your interest.
- And add the items you want to your order list.
- View your order list and see how the total price added up.
🤝 Preparing to Pay
Let's prepare to pay and see how we allow for a secure payment process.
- First agree to the vendor agreement so that the terms are upfront and easy for both parties.
- Then you'll receive a specialized QR code for your order. Join the line and select the card you'll pay with while waiting.
- Once at the front, show the vendor your QR code. Once scanned and approved, you'll be able to confirm your payment
🔄 Full Circle Moment
Now you're all done!
- You're given a receipt to refer to for safekeeping.
- Then you'll be prompted to leave a review for the small business so you can help develop their reputation.
- And once you return to your social feed, your friends will be able to discover the small business you just purchased from!
💭 Reflection
Completing this capstone project showed me a more holistic approach to product, as this was my first time working with a product manager and product marketer. If we had more time, I would have loved to conduct user testing to solidify our design decisions and to narrow down the number of features to avoid overwhelming the user.
Huge thank you to Product Space for this experience! This project marked the end of my design fellowship, but has become the start to how I'll lead the design vertical as the design lead!
Huge thank you to Product Space for this experience! This project marked the end of my design fellowship, but has become the start to how I'll lead the design vertical as the design lead!
IT'S A WRAP
© 2025