Google Pay User Experience research & redesign

7 min readOct 17, 2020

Google pay is the one of the most used app for online payment and bank transactions. There is no doubt that it is also one of the most convent app for payment and transactions as expected from Google.

Hi, readers this is Dinesh Yadav from India and I am in the process of moving on to UI/UX Designing from Visual designing. This is a crucial period as I have to start learning from ground zero but it’s fun also because I am enjoying it. So I am making some fictional projects to put into my portfolio so that it will be easy for the recruiters to understand my knowledge level while hiring me.

I decided to start a user experience research study on Google Pay. It’s always be great to do research and study on the applications that have a huge amount of user base So that one can understand that what are they doing to makes user bound to them.

No doubt that Google Pay has a great User Interface and user flow but there is thing which always bothers me as a user. Their QR Scanner’s position in the app. I always feels that it is out of my reach whenever I tries to use it. That’s where I find my Goal of case study and user search of Google Pay app. By the way I was impressed with my self when I came up with this Title “Dear Google, why your QR is so FAR??”

Literally, I applied every method to reach to the Google Pay QR with my right thumb, just to see that if I am doing something wrong.

Here I decide to study about the Thumb zone area for mobile screens. I find an article of Samantha form Smashing magazine named The Thumb Zone: Designing For Mobile Users. It’s a great article for the User research learners.

This mapping of thumb zone has been done from the article I mentioned above. Light Blue zone is showing the comfortable part for the thumb for movements. Little more dark area of blue is showing the Ok zone like user will feel a lil bit difficulty to reach in that zone. Dark blue zone is showing the most difficult part to be reach for user thumb on mobile screens. Although the difficulty levels are varied for the left hand and right hand users.

After this I got to know that using QR Scanner is quite easy for the left hand users in comparison to the right hand users

Yeah! It’s Partiality. How can Google be so partial for Left and right Hand users.

This is a big problem in terms of user experience So I decided to ask this question from google but..

I found out that Google also Allow to open Its QR Scanner from the right swipe and this spills off my exactment of telling Google a fault. So Mission Failed…

But.. (I know there are a lots of buts are coming in my article but this is what exactly happened with me). I am using google pay for more than months and how come I didn’t know this. I decided to take a little survey. I started the survey in my library, where I study & work and also writing this article from here. So there were not lots of users of the Google pay here but I found some of them. I asked about them as surprisingly no one of them knew the right swipe feature of the Google pay. This makes me more sure that there would be more people who are on the same page like us. I took a surveys for this including putting this problem in my WhatsApp status to know more about this

None of my friends on WhatsApp are aware of this. Some of them thanked me to make their lives easy by telling this right swipe features as they are struggling with the same issue of not reaching thumb to QR Scanner. By the way Please Ignore the last review and if you don’t know what my friend is saying over there then I should tell you that He is asking for the pending Birthday party of mine from the last year. I don’t him anymore haha.

After these Surveys the main question that raised up is “WHY” ?? why nobody is aware of it and thinking about this. So I started to dig it more and come up with these points

I think it’s a user Experience failure if design in not telling to what to do or not indicating. I believe in making features obvious and very common for the users. It should be so obvious that users should not look at the user guide or google it to know about the features. Application should be so user friendly that user can explore the whole app or 90% of the app by it themselves only. It should be work subconsciously like if user swipe down the on the Google pay Screen in current application version then It open their profile information. So this is a big hole in the user experience design if an app is failed to make it its features obvious.

So, As I already said that I am learner of User experience designing then It would be a great opportunity for me to suggest some ideas for this lack of connect.

Changing whole Interface can never be a solution for the corrections in am app and it is also not so costly friendly if you are not Google, Apple or Microsoft. It would also be not great idea because users will struggle in this case a lot more than they are struggling now.

My First redesign is showing a very minimal change in the app. Just swap positions of the QR Scanner and Profile icon and keep the direction and feature same like User can open QR Scanner either form tapping on the new position of the QR Scanner Icon or by swiping down on the screen.

I personally thinks that swiping down will make users lives much much more easier than to the current scenario and as its also a obvious feature as I mentioned earlier that It need to be.

Lets Move on to next idea

As I said that It should not be a big change for the users in the Interface. My second redesign is directing the QR Scanner in the middle of the screen near the Google Pay logo. So Now the profile information is on the same position as it is currently now in Google Pay but it would not open by swiping down to on the screen. If user swipes down on the screen than app should open its QR Scanner. Profile will open by tapping on profile Icon only and something else can be putted on the place of previous QR Scanner icon, for now I putted rewards icon over there.

These are the two designs that I thought for the best minimal change in the Google pay app. This change will benefits users in many ways like I mentioned in below image