I’ve been waiting to write about Venmo’s UX Writing, after redesigning Venmo’s payment interface with criticism last year. Please don’t misunderstand — I love Venmo, and I am a heavy user of it. But as much as I love it, I want to make it better. With that given, I’ll start evaluating and criticizing Venmo’s search field.
The first thing we should know is that Venmo is aiming for fast, safe, and ‘social’ payments. Their primary goal is not just to make users ‘pay’ and ‘receive’ money, but also ‘share’ the payments. This is why this main screen has become a salad bowl, a mixture of features for various goals. Since this article is not about information architecture, I’ll be brief. However, the greed of Venmo to somehow squeeze their business goals is presented in their UX writing, too. Venmo’s writing has more severe issues than this, which we’ll dig in soon.
Let’s begin with the search bar on the top. Its purpose is to search for people or businesses that use Venmo. The reason can be diverse — to pay, to get paid, or just to simply search their transactions. It starts with an action verb ‘Find’, which is a very clear verb to direct the user’s action and show the outcome. They could have used a different word, such as ‘Search’ or ‘Browse’, but I believe they went through user testing to convince ‘Find’ is the best verb for their users. I use this search function a lot, probably more than the ‘Pay or Request’ CTA button on the bottom. I guess my mental model prioritizes who I am paying (or requesting) money to anything else.
One thing that irritates me is the word ‘businesses.’ An individual Venmo user who only uses Venmo among friends (and I believe 90% of my friends are the same), that word ‘businesses’ makes me hesitant for 0.2 seconds. It subtly burdens me when I just want to casually pay my friend. I totally understand this is to promote Venmo’s service providing business-wise payment. However, considering that I’ve never paid to a business with Venmo, and probably never will in the future, each time I have to see the word that isn’t relevant to my purpose of using the app can unconsciously distance me from the service.
Plus, the text doesn’t show that this search function can actually search for someone who isn’t your friend! This is a bigger problem — the text is hiding an important feature that the user could have used.
To solve all the problems stated above, instead of Find friends or businesses, I suggest Find anyone on Venmo.
Except for my small pet peeve, overall the search field placeholder text is doing its job — unless you go to the next step. Below is the page you’ll see after clicking the search bar.
Where is the placeholder text I’ve been looking for?
As soon as the user clicks the field, it takes you to a whole different page. And although you’re still clicking the same search field, the placeholder text has also changed. Although it’s to instruct the user what to search, changing the text completely can confuse the user if they’re on the right page.
Why is it titled ‘Search’ when they used the verb ‘find’ earlier?
There is an inconsistency. Also, the title lacks the object. Search what? It can be anything — a friend, a question, a stock… To make it clear, they should either put an object (eg. Find anyone) or simply delete the title.
Where are the business contacts? Is it just showing my contacts?
If I were a user trying to find CVS to pay money, I would be confused. “Why is it just showing me my friend’s list?”, “If this only shows my contacts, even if I look for Sephora, it won’t show me any results since I’m not a friend with them.” This logic can happen in their head.
Venmo starts showing the businesses tab once the user starts typing something. Again, they are hiding an important option and it is confusing the users.
(TBC)
