Who and what

My client had a small presence in the Peer to Peer (P2P) payment space, and wanted to see if they could become a main competitor in the app realm.

Project background

The client came in with a list of questions they wanted answered:

• In what cases are people paying others?
• What are novel uses of P2P products and why are they used?
• In what instances do people choose different P2P products and why?
• In what circumstances is a P2P product desired where it does not yet exist?

The client came in open to suggestions but with a limited budget.

What we did

In order to best collect the full range of user experiences in the payment journey, we decided to run a diary study with a variety of users, with follow-up interviews with a smaller set of quality participants to dig deeper.

To avoid biasing the study towards one type of user, we recruited participants who had a range of P2P apps: some had many, some had one or two, and a few had no P2P apps at all.

Read the session guide here

Limitations

Due to the limited budget we recruited less participants for the diary study than I would have preferred. In the end, we had 15 participants complete a week’s worth of entries – 8 of those were interviewed later.

The outcome

In the end, we learned that most used P2P payment apps as a tool over all else, and that most were relatively indifferent about which app they used. Participants who used less P2P apps controlled which app was used, because participants with many apps did not want to add a barrier to paying/getting paid by forcing their friends to download a different app.

While we did not find tangible new use case for P2P apps, the client was able to walk away with a specific user audience to aim for and a list of their priorities – most participants wanted tools that were secure, easy to use, and customizable.

Read an extract of the report here

Reflection

Although the study design was sound, we did not have enough completes to find tangible novel use cases for these apps. We also had difficulty finding users who did not use any P2P payment apps who were also tech savvy enough to use dscout, our diary study platform. If possible, I would have liked to recruit closer to 40 participants so that we could have a stronger data set to evaluate.