Overview

When I was starting out in my design career, I was looking for real life problems to solve with design. This project was inspired when I was couch surfing in NYC to pay rent.

Outcome

This was my first design project that I was really proud of. It helped me out when I started out my design journey as a self-taught designer and helped display my design thinking even in a hypothetical sense.

Problem

I had issues managing payments with many people:

1. The person requesting payments would have to do it every single time for each person, which is tedious
2. Searching for people on Venmo is annoying
3. Harder to keep track of who hasn’t paid with larger groups

What I did

Through interviewing friends I found that finding people by user name was a real hassle — same with scanning QR codes. It’s a bit of an awkward process while everyone is finishing up their meal or waiting one by one to scan the phone.

I realized a simpler solution would just be searching people by location, since it’s safe to assume they’d all be at the same table. Now of course there’s a big technical assumption along with privacy concerns, but I wasn’t factoring those in due to the hypothetical nature of this project.

I also realized it’d be a lot easier to simply have a dedicated group of people to have on Venmo, where you can easily request everyone all at once and also have an easier goto place to find people, and also keep better track of who has and hasn’t paid.

What I learned

This was a great project that allowed me to explore what it was like designing for something that already exists. It was also helpful because I got familiar with Origami, my first prototyping tool I learned. The cherry on top though was how many people resonated with the problem and said they’d love to use the feature themselves.