With Mobile Invoicing small business owners can create and send professional invoices in seconds using the PayPal Business App. Every invoice paid means more revenue coming to their business.
The design uses progressive disclosure to show users the essential information they need to start, and allows them to add more to their invoices as needed.
A competitor launched a very similar invoicing product, putting PayPal invoicing under scrutiny: It had not been updated since its launch in 2016, and had a conversion rate 15% lower than its web counterpart. During my discovery process I pulled data from past diary studies, analytics and personas, concluding on two problems:
Our main goal was to facilitate the invoicing process, so sellers can create invoices efficiently, and ultimately, send them faster. An improvement in sent invoices, from 65% to 80% was our measure for success.
There were many opinions in the air on what we should do. In order to align both teams, I ran two ideation exercises: A FOG analysis, capturing facts, opinions and guesses, and an open ideation session so everyone had an opportunity to pitch ideas to improve invoicing.
I helped the team converge in 3 possible design directions to explore:
I designed flows and prototypes with the three concepts, which I tested with 8 users each for comprehension and effectiveness of the flows:
Although users were very successful at following the flow, their mental model did not match the expected use. They didn't perceive a quick payment request as something professional enough.
Templates are useful only for those merchants who sell merchandise without variations. For the rest creating a template on a phone was as time consuming (or more) than creating a single invoice from scratch.
When we showed this proposal to testers, most perceived it as simple and viable to use in multiple situations. Removing clutter from the screen improved the "ease of use" perception amongst participants. They appreciated having "extra" options out of sight, yet available at a single tap.
Removing clutter from the main invoicing screen was the easiest part. The invoicing sub-flows to add items, clients, taxes and more, were long and inconsistent. To close the circle towards creating a more effective experience, I got rid of the existing 13 unique flows used in 19 fields, and created six patterns that engineers could build and reuse for similar flows.
In some cases these patterns specify different routes for fields in use for the first time Vs. pulling information from a list of items, clients, taxes, etc. and edition of those same elements.
The flow optimization also helped make unified decisions on how we present fields.
In the final design the user access sales insights from an entry point in the home screen. Sales can be viewed in different tabs corresponding to time periods. Users can scroll through time sideways and tap on plot points to view information specific to a point in time.
Some details like including the merchant's photo or logo were left out due to technical difficulties loading the information.
Increased conversion
Simple invoicing is still in experimental phase. Conversion was ramping up from 60 to 77% during the first month.
More effective flows
The six flow patterns helped engineers streamline their work and create reusable components.
Influenced invoicing on web
The simplified approach to invoicing was carried over to invoicing for web.
