Project 3, or in my group's case, creating a new feature in Venmo that allows the ability to search and donate to causes (charities, crowdfunding projects etc.) has been a pretty interesting process thus far. We (Touna, Sylvia and myself) are currently crossing what I consider to be the first major checkpoint in the design process which is getting ready to test out an initial prototype (hopefully tomorrow) in effort to either verify or invalidate the design decisions we have decide upon for this first iteration. Our project started at the beginning of the week with some initial affinity mapping which helped in formulating survey questions to gauge a basic understanding of people's ePayment and donation habits.
Exploring these concepts allowed us to create questions that covered all of the grounds that we were attempting to explore which were identifying users social media, crowdfunding and mos importantly, donation habits in regards to both non-profit donations and crowdfunding projects on sites like kickstarter and indiegogo. Our main goal was to identify subjects who both used Venmo and have donated to some sort of cause and we wanted to cover both casual and frequent users of both entities (venmo/donation sites). We used surveymonkey as our main SAAS because of their robust analytics section once surveys have been turned in. While I'm happy with surveymonkey, I have to say typeform's interface (that some other groups used) looked very clear and visually appealing to me so I may explore them as an option in the future. In addition I began drafting an initial userflow of how to currently make a P2P transaction on Venmo just as a starting point for us to compare to when creating our userflows for our new feature.
After analyzing our survey results we began interviews and started doing exercises with sticky notes in effort to begin formulating our personas that will serve as a guide for the rest of our designing process. Personally, my main focus in this persona creation process was to create representations of real people who donate and use Venmo, potential contradictions and all, and not just create some stereotypes of different Venmo users that incorporates basic predictable character traits into their make-up. Having total stereotypes rather than personas that truly reflect the complications of human nature would only have our them serve as checklist of sorts that merely guide us on what we need to include in our design rather than truly depicting who we are designing for and not just what but why we need to account for the things we list in their profiles.
User interviews helped greatly in this process because I truly got to see in action one aspect that we have talked about in class which is, user opinions tend to contradict user behaviors. I conducting a handful of interviews and one of the overlapping trends in the social aspects of Venmo. Particularly how either they hate Venmo's social features but heavily use other mediums of social media on a daily basis, or enjoy the looking at what other people are spending money on but don't personally like having to input a description of payment for their transactions. I also was intrigued of the wide range of responses we received in terms of how people prioritizes the "sharing" aspect of both their personal transactions and their donations to causes. These differentiations (active sharer vs. non-sharer) were huge in dictating the types of personas we decide to flesh out.
(user interview recording)
While creating our personas, Touna had an excellent idea of piecing to together initial personas by doing exercises with sticky notes that listed traits that we found based on our interviews and survey data. This allowed us to visually see our data in different all of the categories we were evaluating and piece together personas based on overlapping patterns and unique traits that seemed to fit together with one another. We were able to draft initial personas after the first round of this exercise and were able to further refine our personas after doing variations of this exercise in multiple rounds. I'm going to hold off on posting our persona's for now but may edit this post after our presentation.
Having our personas fleshed to the extent in which they now are has helped us greatly in our design discussions and userflows which we now have written out for users attempting to donate to a cause. We spent a lot of time just playing around on Venmo and various donation apps trying to figure out the best pathway for use to implement our features. A lot of this process were just all three of us sharing our interpretations of how our users would want to interact with our features and also new concerns that arose organically throughout these discussions. These mainly revolve round where we wanted to put the search function for causes and the differences at a UI level that would be presented to user between a P2P transaction and a donating-based transaction. This made us realize that user testing is going to be key for us before we can do anything drastic which led to our first crack at designing our new Venmo features which occured last Friday and through the weekend (Sylvia volunteered to design this first batch of wireframes). Our goal is to create a POP prototype with Omnigraffle wireframes and see if everything we have done up to this point makes sense to casual users.
Our next steps are mostly dependent upon user testing and whether users understand our userflows and some of the initial UI elements (ex. feed icons for causes) that we are introducing. If not, then we need to go back and revisit some of our previous discussions regarding userflows and design concepts. We also are starting to explore the issue of what we are going to do with crowdfunding projects that have time limits and whether or not we should put a time indicator into Venmo or not. This would have to be clarified on both "causes" search pages and individual cause/project profile pages. We may also analyze the difference between company (causes, orgs, projects) signup and personal user signup on Venmo because Venmo already has access to personal info when you signup currently as a user. I'm not exactly sure how signing up as a project or org would be different and even within that context, how would crowdfunding signup differ from charity signup? These issues need further clarification at this point. Next step, test the...
