No, I did not accidentally Venmo someone $300, but now that I have your attention, let’s talk about Venmo.
Credit: Time Magazine
Upon opening the app, you’re reading your friends’ transactions. Maddie paid Alyssa for dinner, Thomas requested Teresa for the tickets, and Jake couldn’t think of a caption so he just used emojis. After talking to people about what they thought about the platform, there was a general consensus around two ideas:
Venmo stalking is real. And weird.
A good Venmo caption = success.
These two statements may not seem to agree with each other, one being a con of Venmo and the other being a pro; however, in reality, one leads to another. You open up Venmo, read a funny caption, see that your best friend just paid her utility bill, scroll past a bunch of emojis, and somehow end up deep into your ex’s Venmo profile and see that they got dinner with someone else a month ago. That’s pretty sad. And the fact that anyone can do that, if your payments are public (which they are by default), is truly scary.
The app
This endless feed is Venmo’s landing page. But if Venmo’s purpose is to send your friends money instantly and easily, then why are we being thrown all this fluff when we open the app? The answer is marketing. The feed acts as Venmo’s own promotion tool. It advertises how many of your friends are using the app and how frequently they use it while the captions gamify the entire experience. In an interview with Moneyish, Venmo spokesperson, Josh Criscoe, claims “Venmo has married the social element and the financial element, which no one else has been able to crack, and that’s what really sets us apart.” But how social should Venmo be?
when it got personal
I started to seriously ask myself this question when my dad started liking and commenting on my Venmo payments. But from the perspective of my dad, who lacks some social cues, it makes sense. For him, it’s like Instagram but with money. He’s brought onto his friend feed, and from there he can go to his profile page or the explore page which is a universal feed for all Venmo transactions—kind of like Instagram!
Features & their issues
Furthermore, the Venmo payment and request feature—it’s main feature—is accessed by clicking the small icon in the top right corner. Because of the icon’s thin stroke and lack of color, the button gets lost in the corner amidst eye-grabbing, emoji-filled feed. After one finally finds the pay/request button, users are required to enter the amount, add a recipient, and of course, write a caption. At the very bottom, users can choose to pay or request. It’s pretty embarrassing to say, but I honestly did not realize Venmo had a request feature until a friend told me. The options blended into one because of the thin white line that divided the two buttons. Maybe that’s my fault for not being observant, but it doesn’t look too good on Venmo’s UI either. For me, the option of adding a Bitmoji to my caption is more apparent than the divide between “Request” and “Pay.”
Credit: The Venmo Blog
Moving onto a bigger issue: privacy and security. In September, The Mozilla Foundation and EFF published an open letter to Venmo advocating for more privacy on the app. Open up any banking app and you’ll immediately be sent to a log-in page, and every time the app crashes (which tends to happen quite frequently with banking apps), you’ll be forced to sign in again. Now, compare that to Venmo’s landing page: emojis and captions that read “rent.” Unless you go into the settings and require a passcode at sign in, Venmo will not do that automatically. And because of that, people can go into your phone and venmo themselves $2000 when you think they’re giving you their number at a bar. After some research, I found out the story was faux, but my point remains the same: it is possible.
My solution
I quickly sketched out my own UI for Venmo below. In doing so, I thought about—
Security—making Face ID (I mistakenly wrote Touch ID in the sketch below), removing the public option for payments along with the public feed, and adding a second Face ID verification at payment
Visibility—changing the pay/request flow to two separate flows so users don’t accidentally do one instead of the other as well as clearly noting those flows at the top to the page
Convenience— an extra feature to enhance the payment process, allowing users to utilize Bluetooth to easily pay friends in the area, so they don’t have to search for them each time
Please excuse the very rough-draft nature of my sketch, but it still gets to the point—these simple changes could make a huge impact on Venmo for the better. Venmo’s decisions made sense when they were just starting and trying to advertise their product as much as possible, but now, I believe that it would be best to make changes. Because the company has already gained quite the market share, I think implementing these changes wouldn’t severely affect their business model, but, in fact, make users happier by feeling firstly more secure.
Remember: for now, you can add more privacy to your transactions through settings, add a passcode to your account, and finally, a good Venmo caption = success.
This was originally published on Medium.