Simplifying Group Payments:
Venmo POS Integration for Effortless Bill Splitting

① PROBLEM STATEMENT

Splitting the bill at the end of your meal is a pain in the butt. The person putting their card down needs to get the receipt, take a picture, note who got what, and then pro-rate tax and tip: all before even manually adding the request in whichever app they use. To improve the experience of putting your card down, I started to think about a feasible solution for my app of choice - Venmo.

② RESEARCH

User Interviews
Living in New York has given my friends and I our fair share of experiences going out in a large group to enjoy a meal. Following these outings, I've engaged with my friends in insightful conversations, delving into their experiences and perspectives on splitting the bill. Through these discussions, I've gained valuable insights into their pain points, habits, and motivations.

01. Accuracy: While some people are content with splitting the bill evenly for simplicity's sake, issues arise when individuals opt out of certain expenses or indulge in pricier items. In these cases, exact calculations become necessary.

02. Immediacy: The group dynamic determines how immediately the bill payer requests other guests. In gatherings with unfamiliar guests, there's often an immediate effort to exchange Venmo accounts and calculate expenses at the table. Whereas with close friends, there's more flexibility to settle the tab at a later time.

03. Methods of Calculation: Everyone has adopted a different method based on its ease of use and they will usually stick to that tool.

Competitive Analysis

Although there are various apps that exist for calculating totals, they all require the bill payer to perform calculations outside of the Venmo app. Based on my research and first-hand experience, I have identified the distinguishing features of the 3 most used bill-splitting tools.

Key Findings

01. Personal Trip Validity: Users are making personal trips throughout their business day and the current state of the app requires users to spend additional time managing their mileage or using workarounds to minimize time spent editing their trip data (i.e. manually enterred trips account for 14% of total trip types)

02. Trip Order: The current trip order is unintuitive and contributes to cognitive load for the user

03. Time Spent Reviewing: Users only spend around 5-10 minutes reviewing mileage before submitting to their employers and only 30% of users check their app weekly

After analyzing these 3 apps, I concluded that in order for Venmo to enhance the bill-splitting experience, they should prioritize a seamless integration of calculation functionality directly in the app. By consolidating all aspects of bill splitting within the Venmo app, they can offer users a seamless and efficient process for a common occurrence.

Key Findings

02. Trip Order: The current trip order is unintuitive and contributes to cognitive load for the user

03. Time Spent Reviewing: Users only spend around 5-10 minutes reviewing mileage before submitting to their employers and only 30% of users check their app weekly

Solution

The initial solution that emerged was mirroring Tab to integrate optimal character recognition (OCR) technology into the Venmo app to extract data directly from receipts, eliminating the need for third-party apps for calculation. The user would simply capture a photo of the receipt in the Venmo app and associate each item on the receipt with the corresponding guest.

However, upon exploring further, I recognized the potential for streamlining the process even more. Instead of building OCR tech within the app (which still requires an act of taking a photo) I explored the possibility of integrating popular POS (Point of Sale) systems like Toast or Cash with Venmo directly. This integration would enable users to request receipts directly from the POS system to be sent to their Venmo account, removing the step of capturing a photo of the receipt altogether and avoiding the complexity of building OCR functionality directly into the Venmo app.

Key Findings

02. Trip Order: The current trip order is unintuitive and contributes to cognitive load for the user

03. Time Spent Reviewing: Users only spend around 5-10 minutes reviewing mileage before submitting to their employers and only 30% of users check their app weekly

Market Research

To explore how viable this solution is, I performed some research into POS systems for the hospitality industry in America. According to various industry reports, the adoption of POS systems has been increasing steadily over the years. It is estimated that over 80% - 90% of restaurants in the United States use POS systems to manage their operations. This high adoption rate is driven by the numerous benefits that POS systems offer to hospitality businesses, including streamlined order-taking, efficient payment processing, inventory management, and detailed sales reporting. Given this research, this solution felt feasible and worth exploring.

Key Findings

02. Trip Order: The current trip order is unintuitive and contributes to cognitive load for the user

03. Time Spent Reviewing: Users only spend around 5-10 minutes reviewing mileage before submitting to their employers and only 30% of users check their app weekly

③ DESIGN PROCESS

With the research conducted above, I started to design a streamlined feature for Venmo users. The solution incorporates an integration of data from POS systems and the ability to calculate amounts directly in the app.

Updated Bottom Nav: The first design decision I had to make was how to best introduce this new functionality. My initial idea was to create a separate tab in the bottom nav, dedicated to managing receipts that the user sends from the POS system to their account after a meal. When a user has a new receipt available, a badge indicator next to the Receipt icon will appear.
Fit into Existing Nav: As I got further along in the design process, I recognized that Venmo’s business strategy is to strongly push Cards and Crypto and is unlikely to remove these sections from their navigation. To explore another option, I added a Pending Receipts section to the existing Transactions tab under the user’s Profile tab.
Decision: Without context into Venmo’s business priorities and my personal lack of interest in a Venmo credit card or crypto, I decided that highlighting the new functionality for this feature was more important and could be reverted after significant feature adoption. Additionally, I strongly believe this new functionality would be seen as an instant value add for a significant portion of Venmo users.

User Selection: When a user clicks on the receipt they want to calculate, we bring them to the existing Venmo page for selecting users where they can search by name or username, view a list of the most common users they interact with, as well as other friends.
Item Selection: As I was designing the selection process for items, there were a few questions surrounding functionality that came to mind. The first question I had was is it more intuitive to assign by diner or by item? I reviewed competitor functionality in the Tab app, and decided to also assign items by the diner. Another question that crossed my mind was how to best signal when a user performs certain actions? I added a rectangle to highlight which diner was selected, added a counter when an item was assigned to them, and added the profile icon next to the selected item on the receipt.

Receipt Editing & Final Calculations: A question that came up during the design process, was should we offer the ability to edit item amounts and tip if we are getting data directly from a POS system? While there is value in providing this functionality, I decided it was not necessary in the first version. As more users start using this feature and we gain more data into the accuracy of the POS integration, we can always iterate and add enhanced editing capabilities.
Notification: Similar to existing functionality, I added a notification to ensure users are aware of the requests being made successfully.

④ USER INTERVIEWS & IMPROVEMENTS

In order to test my designs, I conducted user interviews where I had them test the prototype I built. They were tasked with allocating the items on the receipt to 3 guests and sending a request. While the overall sentiment of having this feature directly within the Venmo app was well received, the interviews highlighted some missing functionality and minor confusion with the UI.

Even Splitting: Some users that planned on splitting the bill evenly at a later time still wanted to utilize the POS integration as a reminder in Venmo. To enable a quicker transaction for those groups of users, I added a toggle to split the bill evenly amongst the selected diners.
Enhanced Review UI: Additionally, the testing revealed some confusion during the review step. When testers were reviewing calculations before sending the request, it was not clear that the tax and tip were factored into the final calculations. Some users thought the tax and tip were in addition to the per user calculations. In response to this feedback, I hid the Tax and Tip from the view on default. If the user is curious what went into the final calculations, they can click on + Show details, which will expand the view to show the values of tax and tip.

⑤ CONCLUSION

As you can probably guess, I do not work for Venmo. This was simply an idea that was inspired by a problem I face on a weekly basis. Throughout the design process, I faced a few challenges. The first one being fitting my idea into the existing Venmo functionality and UI. Additionally, ensuring this feature was as usable as possible.

While conducting research, it was clear this was a prevalent problem that other apps and designers were trying to solve. However, no other competitor or study I reviewed focused on making the transaction as seamless as possible. By building directly into the Venmo app and integrating the receipt with a POS system, users are no longer required to utilize multiple tools and manual steps.

On the right here, you can see my final prototype. Thanks for browsing! :)

As you can probably guess, I do not work for Venmo. This was simply an idea that was inspired by a problem I face on a weekly basis. Throughout the design process, I faced a few challenges. The first one being fitting my idea into the existing Venmo functionality and UI. Additionally, ensuring this feature was as usable as possible.

While conducting research, it was clear this was a prevalent problem that other apps and designers were trying to solve. However, no other competitor or study I reviewed focused on making the transaction as seamless as possible. By building directly into the Venmo app and integrating the receipt with a POS system, users are no longer required to utilize multiple tools and manual steps.

Below, you can see my final prototype. Thanks for browsing! :)