Exploring Redesigning Digital P2P Payments to Facilitate Social Connections: A Participatory Design Approach

Existing work has highlighted the increasingly important role of digital peer-to-peer (P2P) payments (i.e., money transactions between individuals via online or mobile services) in our social lives. Indeed, such transactions continue to shape how we deal with money when interacting with each other. Still, little research has explored how these insights are understood by actual digital P2P payments users and can be translated into practical designs to improve current digital P2P payment systems. As our first endeavor to address this gap, the study adopted a Participatory Design approach to investigate how actual users envision and redesign future digital P2P payments to better facilitate their social connections with known contacts. Our study contributes to the current HCI discourse on the increasing interplay of financial technology and social connections by (1) uncovering nuanced user perceptions of digital P2P payments in everyday social interactions and (2) offering creative and actionable future directions to redesign digital P2P payments to further facilitate social connections based on user-generated design envisions.