Research Insights & Competitive Analysis
Sending money online has become as simple as a few taps on a smartphone, and there now exists a much larger market
for designing around mobile payments.
We used venmo as a case study for our idea: it requires the least effort
to actually send money, and also that it's the most social of mobile payment apps. There is room to leverage Venmo's commenting/liking
features for social connection.
There is an entertainment value in "liking" a friend's public payment. Venmo's lack of anonymity is unique as well, one of us
sent a celebrity a penny.
In the Yo app, you can send literally a word "Yo" to a friend, and nothing else. The novel "uselessness" of Yo likely contributed to its success.
We saw the ephemeral popularity of Yo as an inspiration for building a similarly light-hearted app that may achieve viral success.
User Research Experiment 1: Pennies vs Potatoes
In this experiment, we had 5 participants send pennies to five of their friends on Venmo, and then send a picture of a potato-meme
to a different set of friends. We asked all participants to reflect on their experience at the time and also after 48 hours to learn about any follow up interactions.
Sending a penny on Venmo's comedic effect is not different than spreading a meme, we assumed that there is something specifically unique and
entertaining about sending a penny to a friend that is more powerful than a meme. We wanted to test this assumption and not fall victim to the "correlation equals causation" fallacy.
All participants echoed our thoughts about the novelty of sending pennies, they enjoyed the trolling nature specifically. Sending pennies was seen as more universal than sending a potato (which lead to awkward interactions). We decided it was best to continue our design around sending actual pennies rather than "valueless" memes.
User Research Experiment 2: Giant Pennies
We designed a meme-themed penny and laser cut it into wood. Three of our team members gave five pennies to their friends (total of 15 people). We
spontaneously gave it to a friend, and observed the reactions.
While we gained a better understanding of what it's like to give a penny, we also wanted
to understand hwo people react to spontaneously-presented token gifts.
One fun reaction included What is this, a drink toaster? (a purpose for which it was promptly used). Another friend even mentioned she wanted to buy the fake penny!
People enjoy reciving spontaneous gifts, even if the gift's identity was ambigous. All these gifts resulted in a brief conversation that otherwise would not have occured, this is a positive social outcome that we can use for good
Storyboarding Scenarios
We explored different use cases in our brainstorm sessions and found the following use cases emerged in our storyboards
Scenarios backed up by data will inform how we want to design the interactions within the app.
Connecting old friends and also maintaining relationships.
Breaking the ice with new friends.
Just for fun & trolling.
Meeting new contacts/celebrity communication.
Rapid Paper Prototyping
We started out with very low fidelity paper prototyping to test the core functionalities of Penny, as well as our UI design choices.
Rapid prototyping and iterations allowed us to quickly test out different UI layouts and flows, without having to waste time making a pixel-perfect flow only to have it not work.