Requirements Gathering
Methods
The primary and secondary methods that we used to form user requirements were a survey and an interview. The main motive behind using a survey is to gather a lot of quantitative information about possible users. We created and distributed the survey through Google Forms which is very accessible and great at condensing results. In addition to the survey, we decided to interview people as it would fill in gaps and provide answers to questions that can’t necessarily be answered through a survey. The use of interviewing people would also provide us with the complementary qualitative data that a survey doesn’t quite provide. We received 31 responses for the survey while we gathered 2 interview responses.
Findings:
Most if not all of the users, that we collected data from, are college students which are one of our main target audiences.
One of the key findings from this user research is that 29% of participants reported that they strongly agree that they forget about payments that people owe them.
32.3% of participants reported that they agree that they forget about payments that people owe them. The average answer lies with people forgetting payments that people owe them rather than them remembering about those payments. When survey participants were asked if they were already comfortable and satisfied with other financial/payment apps such as Venmo, the strong majority (77.4%) answered that they were.
Another clear finding from the user research is that the majority once again (80.6%) agreed that auto payments make their lives easier.
A question where there was a lot of distribution among the respondents was where they were asked if they found confronting someone for a payment uncomfortable. Because the answer to this question doesn’t mean that we should add/remove a specific feature, the creation of the app, in general, should resolve this issue for those who found it uncomfortable.
When asked about being concerned about sharing bank/payment information within an application, 11 participants stated that they are strongly concerned. 29% of the responses resulted in people feeling neither concerned nor unconcerned with sharing bank/payment information within an app.
Conclusions
From our findings we have found out that people want to know when payments are coming up, whether it be by a calendar (provided by the app) or by notification, this lets us know that we should create a persona that needs notifications/reminders from the application to solve a problem in their life which should be modeled in a scenario.
People want to have auto payments by a huge margin. This tells us people want to be informed but to be distant from the monthly
Given that the data for the question, that asks if people are comfortable confronting people to make payments, is very even all across the board it seems that our app will solve these issues for those people who struggle to confront others for payments.
Because most people reported that they are satisfied with other payment apps, we plan on drawing inspiration from those popular apps when designing our interfaces and structure within the application. This will allow the app to feel familiar and be easy to learn which is an important UX goal.
People want there to be an auto payments feature on the app, by a large margin. This lets us know that this feature should be included in the creation of our application.
Analyzing a couple of the questions, people forget when someone owes them a payment. More than 70% of the people surveyed forget about money owed to them. However, this conflicts with another response on the survey saying they trust people to make these payments. It seems people tend to trust other people to give them the money when confronted to do so, but they tend to forget that these payments exist. This information is vital as this is the problem space we are trying to solve for people.
Caveats
Most of our information has come from our fellow peers and friends and family, so there may be some bias in our information. However, our app does involve money and questions are quite open-ended so we hope that people will feel more incentivized to answer honestly. In addition, the participants were mostly from Chico, CA, a small college town that perhaps does not encapsulate other possible users.