VenmoMeal
A mobile service that engages more people to join Feeding America in fighting hunger.
The Basics
Company
Feeding America
Team
4 people
Time
3 months
My Role
Product Designer / UX Strategist
The Problem
Feeding America is looking to attract more users to join the organization to fight against hunger in America, preferably by making monetary donations. Young professionals usually hesitate to donate to charities because they have found it hard to integrate charitable donations into their current lifestyle. Our team was inspired to design a digital donation experience that could be seamlessly integrated to our target user's lifestyle. Our goal was to uncover the pain points and barriers that inhibited young professionals from making donations to non-profit organizations, and help Feeding America to engage more people in their hunger-relief initiatives.
​
Disclaimer: Venmo is not in partnership with Feeding America and this project is purely conceptual.
​
Usere & Audience
The target users of VenmoMeal are young professionals who have gained financial independence and would love to make their own contributions to the common good. However, these users normally feel overwhelmed by tons of information about all different non-profit organizations. They don't know which ones to choose and are always questioning how much impact they could make.
Team & Role
Teamed up with 3 other designers, I took a more UX Strategist role on the team and the point of contact between my team and our clients from Feeding America.
​
I coordinated and contributed in all facets of design including: design research, user task flows, interactions, prototyping and testing. I personally conducted Business Validation that proved the concept profitability and stakeholder feasibility and presented in the final pitch to the clients.
Design Process
In order to define the problem space and uncover the unmet needs of our users regarding the donation experience, we started out by recruiting target audience for User Research. We adopted various Design Research methods, including online surveys, contextual interviews, card sorting activities, etc., to solicit their feelings and opinions on the relevant topic.
​
After synthesizing all of the research learnings, we were able to identify the key pain points that our target users had while making donation decisions: they didn't know where to start!
Young professionals, with their busy life and little experience in donating, usually feel overwhelmed by the tons of information about different types non-profit organizations, which they are not familiar with. Doing research and navigating ways of donating mean extra effort and they could easily get lost. Besides, as they are not sure how influential a specific organization is, they would also question how much impact they could make by donating to that organization.
From there, we understood that to motivate our users to make charitable donations, the end-to-end donating experience, from learning about the recipients to really making the donation, would have to be easily integrated to their normal lifestyle.
Therefore, we were inspired to leverage an existing online transaction platform, Venmo, to bridge the digital transaction and donating to Feeding America. We named our service VenmoMeal.
To identify the key specs that had to be included in this project, we conducted 2 rounds of prototyping and usability testing with iterative fidelities. In the first round, we sketched out our brainstormed concepts into user storyboards, and solicited user feedback on each one. Then we were able to prioritize these concepts in tiers -- from those that were must-haves to meet users’ unmet needs to those that were nice-to-have to extend user engagement. In the second round, we tested high-fidelity wireframes with interactions to polish the user experience.
We also did observational studies to determine the optimal Point of Entry as the start of this digital donation experience. Our initial hypothesis was it would be easy to have the main point of entry be physical materials placed in locations like casual restaurants and coffee shops where young professionals often use Venmo. To test its validity, we placed printed QR code and promotional flyers at local settings around campus and observed people's interaction with them.
From this "in-field" testing, we quickly realized that physical locations can’t be effective to attract users. Therefore we decided to incorporate the point of entry into the Venmo interactions that already exists.
The Challenge
As we started to explore the entire User Flow for this digital donation experience, the biggest challenge we encountered was to balance the conflict of interests between our target users and our client.
Because young professionals don't fully understand the ultimate value of their donation, they don’t know what the impact of their donated money can be in the end. As a result, they would prefer to donate cans of beans instead of 1 dollar, at least that's a clear dietary value. However, Feeding America values monetary donation the most because with their nation-wide partnerships, they are able to magnify the impact and every dollar, converting $1 into 10 meals.
The Solution
Under their discrepant opinions, we uncovered the shared interest: both users and the charity organization think highly of their ultimate impact. In our user testing, we included a card-sorting activity that asked users to rank different pieces of information in the order of importance for them to get to know more about the organization and to quantify the impact they could make with their donation.
​
Besides, we also learned from user research that young professionals highly valued their friends' perspectives. If they knew that their friends donated to a certain organization, they would be more likely to choose the same one. It was also proved in our usability testing that features with strong social aspect drove the most user engagement.
​
Our design objective was to help our user acquire the critical information that they cared about the most efficiently and to integrate this learning phase seamlessly into the donation process, minimizing the interruption to the entire experience. Additionally, we would create an engaging network on the platform where users could learn from as well as influence their connections.
User Interface Design
The 3 key features of VenmoMeal are:
-
Round-Up: As proved to be users' most favorable feature, described by them as “a fast enough interruption.” ​
​
-
Invite Friends: This feature will allow users to invite people from their current contacts on Venmo as well as those who are not on the app yet.​
​
-
Business Profile: users can access important information about the charity organization. There's also a quick donation button that prompts the user to donate.
Round-Up
when users go to pay someone through the app in the familiar way, a popup will come up that asks the user if they want to roundup. The user is then able to click the Learn More option which will bring up a small popup showing them important information about Feeding America. The user can choose to roundup and donate a small amount to Feeding America.
We chose to phrase the popup as in 50 cents is 5 meals so that the user knows that even their small donation will make a big difference. Additionally, we considered the fact that often in Venmo people pay round numbers and so have decided to provide users with the option to donate $1 if this is the case.
Invite Friends
when users choose to donate to Feeding America they are met with a Thank You popup that asks them if they want to invite friends to donate. If the user chooses this option they are taken to a page where they can select which of their friends they would like to invite. If more than one friend is chosen the user is asked to create a donating group and enter some basic information such as group name and goal donation amount. After this the user is taken to the group donation page where they can see how close they are to the goal and which of their friends have donated.
One thing that is important to note is that this feature will allow users to invite people to donate from their current list of Venmo friends but will also allow them to invite people that are not part of the app.
Business Profile for Non-profit Organizations
Users can go to read important information about the organization including what Feeding America does, how much impact the user can make and how much of an impact Feeding America is making. Additionally, there are quick action donation buttons on the page that prompt the user to donate once they have learned a little bit more about Feeding America.
This is a part of the interaction that we spent a lot of time on because we realized the information architecture for this page was crucial. Through research activities such as card sort and co-creation we realized that users mostly want to know briefly what the organization does and what their impact will be. Additionally, the call to action needs to be very clear and accessible or else users will not take the time to search for it. This would be a completely new aspect of Venmo if implemented and so it was important for us to make sure we did exhaustive research to fully understand what this profile page should look like.
Points of Entry
We incorporated multiple points of entry into the interaction. As briefly mentioned earlier, people often deterred from scanning QR codes or simply do not know how to use them. Because of this insight we decided to include the point of entry into the Venmo interaction that already exists.
​
-
A call-to-action button embedded in the Round Up feature demonstrated earlier (screenshot 1).
-
Featuring a charity organization's profile on top when the compose payment button is clicked and uses need to select the recipient of transaction (screenshot 2).
-
An ad that would be included on the existing Venmo community feed (screenshot 3).
-
Push-notification on lock screen that makes use of geofencing when users enter the venues where donating through Venmo is available (screenshot 4).
The Outcome
At the end of our project, we did a final pitch to Feeding America’s corporate strategy team at their headquarters in downtown Chicago. We demonstrated our key features and stated the value propositions of VenmoMeals to user, Feeding America and Venmo.
​
As the UX strategists on the team, I conducted analogous research to prove the concept profitability and quantified the impact: with Venmo’s 40 million users, and according to the current statistic that 60% households in U.S donate to a charity in a given year, we assume 60% of 40MM users will donate $1 every month, it would generate 288 million dollars donation in cash for Feeding America.