Maizy Guinn
Joline Blais
NMD 200
02 October 2019

Not Everything Needs to be social

Venmo Is an app created in 2009 by two ex-college roommates looking for an easy way to pay each other back. The simply concept of paying someone back snowballed and created this giant social media money transfer app known by most. What’s the problem with easy money transfer you ask? That’s the problem, Venmo is not about paying your friend it is about the funny memo you will post and be put on all your friend’s screen to be liked and commented on. Our lives are already consumed with our devices and these artificial “social” interactions, what we need is more real-life person communication and touch. The Problem is that Venmo is an unnecessary social media app.

I first started thinking about this problem when I found myself spending time scrolling through everyone’s transaction looking at the funny comments and replies. It got me thinking, why is something so simple as banking giving me entertainment. Something as personal as financial transactions shouldn’t just be posted on a wall to be shared. Everyone I bring this up to has some story or incident with using Venmo and things getting put out into the world that is private. For example, my friend found out her “friends” were bad-mouthing her through Venmo comments. The “friends” somehow thought that paying a friend back was a good private platform to talk about there issues with my friend. To leave a comment on a payment feels unnecessary, but to have people put effort into jokes and have them on a feed for anyone to see and like makes the platform seem like a joke.

The Venmo app in Figure 1 is the first screen you see when opening the app. It is all your friend’s transactions and memos attached you cans ee the options to like and comment immediately. Figure 2 depicts the screen for if you click the earth icon which will show you, random strangers, transactions. Figure 3 displays the screen when you click on the single silhouette which gives a feed of all of your transaction history. Figure 4 is the note pad icon which prompts you to start a transaction, in which you have the option to tag others, use a custom Venmo emoji, and change privacy setting which the default is public. The message portion is not optional as in order to complete the transaction you have to write something(Figure 5).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

When looking at the pros and cons list it is hard to determine what we value the most. From a marketing standpoint, one may believe high retention rates and accessibility are the most import but from an economic standpoint, they may value privacy the most. As humans when creating anything we must first ask ourselves “are we doing harm?”. I believe valuing the user first is my goal to make sure I am only bettering them rather than doing any wrong. Sometimes tech companies lose a grip on this and become obsessed with the views and likes they forget about the mental health of the person behind the screen. Something as simple as money transfer should be just that simple. An app cannot give you that same human interaction as watching someone open a birthday card with some money in as sending a Venmo message saying happy birthday with ten dollars attached. I value making humans time spent on tech as low as possible to give them more freedom to have those real-life connections.

Taking the pros and cons list above I have re-designed Venmo. Starting off I would want to keep the aesthetic and simplistic layout as it allows for a very user-friendly interface. The first change I believe needs to be done the most is creating financial and general privacy. To create this confidentiality I would completely eliminate the feeds of your friends and strangers. I don’t believe your “friends”, which are people in your phone contacts, necessarily need to know who you are paying and why especially not strangers. No feeds means no required memos in transactions which in theory could mean an even faster process of getting money from point A to point B. By eliminating the feeds this will remove the social aspect of the app that reduces its addictiveness all together. By removing the feeds a purely making the app a money transfer app between you and the person the money is sent to will ultimately drop the user retention. With Venmo having rough 40 million user the audience is there but as stated before it would be about keeping them on the platform. What got people into Venmo was the feeds, likes, and friends, remove those and you have Paypal. Funny enough with my research I found Venmo is owned by Paypal which makes a lot of sense for a company to see this concept created by college kids taking off to buy it and market it right back to that audience. It is brilliant yet alarming as that means Paypal created a social media platform knowing well enough money transactions do not need to be entertaining but they knew they could make a profit off their audience by implementing these addictive tools.

Figure 6

In conclusion, my final redesign for Venmo in Figure 6 is an even simpler interface made to only make a transaction so you can spend more of your time getting your dopamine rushes from real-life interaction then likes on your message about groceries.