PayPal Business is a native app that empowers 1.2 million small business owners worldwide enabling them to manage their sales operations by sending invoices, monitoring progress, resolving disputes, tracking loans, and reviewing transactions.
As an IC design lead, I shaped the vision and framework of the Business App, positioning it as a convenient payment solution for on-the-go small businesses.
I also mentored a junior designer, ensuring adherence to best practices, collaborated with project managers, a researcher, and mobile engineers on iOS and Android platforms.
This retrospective provides glimpses of my three-year journey with the team. Feel free to ask for more details.
I established an efficient design operation process for a team of two. This included implementing a centralized file system, documenting changes, and maintaining a transparent sprint planning site.
As a leader, I emphasized a research-informed design practice. We conducted bi-weekly design tests using various techniques, involving product managers and engineers in asking questions and debriefing.
In just a year, our team conducted more user research studies than any other at the company.
To align the app with PayPal for web, I simplified the font variations from 16 to 4, reducing the app size.
I introduced a tile system for the home screen, ensuring a flexible layout while maintaining information integrity, system which became widely adopted across teams.
While not solely responsible for maintaining the style guide, I oversaw its consistency and the correct application of patterns in the app, adding implemented patterns to the app's supplemental library.
Collaborating with our research team, I conducted a diary study to inform our product and design strategy and gain insights into the needs of our users. We visited small business owners in the U.S. and India, observing their work.
The study resulted in well-defined personas and journey maps, which effectively communicated the SMB merchant story to our team and leadership. It also shed light on the neglected audience of service providers, leading to new opportunities in our roadmap.
I helped my team brainstorm on new initiatives for our yearly roadmap, focused on improving efficiency of payments for merchants on-the-go and establish new opportunities.
The app's homepage lacked guidance for small business owners on important tasks and objectives at PayPal. They desired actionable data, insights, and relevant tasks tailored to their business needs.
Our mission was to create an at-a-glance view that highlighted overall status and pending actions, personalized to each user's journey with PayPal.
In collaboration with the web home screen team, I developed a scalable Home Framework that consistently presented information across platforms. I prioritized discrete areas for critical information, ensuring a sense of permanence and providing guidelines for other teams to add notifications, features, and cross-sells.
One challenge was maintaining the web home screen hierarchy while condensing it into a single feed on the app, without overwhelming the user.
I addressed this by creating expandable notification zones and setting guidelines for notification permanence and cross-sells. We conducted a pilot program to display different levels of importance in notifications to merchants, allowing us to fine-tune our approach and provide a seamless user experience.
The home feed adapts to merchants' journey, providing relevant information as they progress:
We launched a floating action button to trigger commonly used flows, so users can make the most out of their time.
100% growth YoY
Every year we doubled our user base, and maintained a 4.3 star rating on both Android and iOS app stores.
Removed feature silos
The home framework design took information out of the silos of features and pages, adding transparency to the app.
Added patterns to UI library
The card patterns were adopted by other teams and added to our official UI library.
