PayPal App Case Study

01 - Discovery

OPENING DIGITAL
WALLET 2.0

We hit the ground running.

PayPal asked Ueno to help “rethink and re-design the heart of the PayPal experience,” guiding the company as it endeavored to “evolve from a collection of features to an integrated suite of products,” starting with the home screen and navigation.

We hit the ground running, starting with Stakeholder Interviews to (gently!) shake down PayPal’s executive/product leadership.

We heard conflicting priorities:

Help users discover the new functionality.

Create a simple, intuitive, differentiated experience.

Do no harm to revenue-generating functionality.

In parallel, we conducted a Landscape Audit, tearing down over 40 consumer finance apps.

We analyzed how they express priorities through core value-proposition positioning on the app store, home-screen designs, and navigational hierarchy.

01 - Discovery

a dangerous
landscape

In 2020, the world of financial services was changing fast.

Consumer tech heavyweights like Apple, Google, and Samsung had created payment solutions of their own, and they brought guns to the knife fight.

Deep integration with biometric hardware and core OS software meant meant access to secure, frictionless payments - an experience PayPal could not match. 

Meanwhile, “Neobanks” were changing the consumer banking game with a winning combination of affordable, financial services, offered through simple, friendly interactive digital planning tools.

An un-winnable wallet.

Neobanks, neoproblems.

Where was PayPal in this?

So, the industry was changing.
PayPal aimed to change with it.
....by adding all of the financial services.

We just ... needed to design a home-screen and navigation to organize all of them?

We couldn’t be everything for everybody.
What should we be, and for who?
We needed to prioritize.

Because here’s the thing: designing home screens and navigation constructs is really about expressing and enabling an app’s core value proposition.

So ... what was PayPal’s?

We proposed a few different ways to prioritize.

‍

We tried to prioritize based on the needs of the company's users, triangulated by the demands of the company's business.

What if... we grounded the entire experience in the goals of each user?

So, we couldn't prioritize for one type of user.

But what if we could personalize to every user?

What if we could ground our entire experience in the financial goals of our each users?

We could help users understand those goals.
We could connect them to PayPal's services.

We could define a path to meeting them.
We could track their progress along the way.

We could help pay for today and plan for tomorrow.

02 - STRATEGY

meet
paypal 3.0

Your guide to financial wellness.

If Digital Wallet 2.0 was a re-design,
PayPal 3.0 would be more like a re-birth.

Not a wallet.
Not even a bank.

A GPS for your money.

Because wellness is not an end goal.

It's a mindset.
A way to live.

PayPal 3.0 would guide your behavior.

Personalized.

PayPal 3.0 meets you where you are; capturing your financial reality, balancing aspirations and behavior.

Link what you have.

Open Banking & Account Aggregation meant that PayPal 3.0 could meet you where you are, capturing bank accounts, loans, credit cards, and investments.

Capture what you want.

With Onboarding Flow, Goals, and Wish Lists, PayPal 3.0 captures financial aspirations.

Dreams for tomorrow, delights for today.

Track what you do.

With Transactions & Spending Analysis, set spending targets, then track your efforts to meet them in real time.

Effortless.

PayPal 3.0 provides actionable guidance.
Automated guardrails that keep you on track.

Actionable guidance.

With Goal Planning & Investment Projection, PayPal 3.0 turns big-picture financial aspirations into concrete goals & savings milestones.

Automated guardrails.

Through Savings Strategies & PayPal Services, PayPal 3.0 draws a clear path to success, then guides you toward it, automating where possible

Stay on track.

With Budgets, Safe to Spend, and Save to Save, PayPal 3.0 builds sticky habits by helping adhere to goals and weigh trade-offs when off-track.

Motivated.

PayPal 3.0 inspires constant momentum through socially motivated & addictively gamified mechanics.

Game dynamics.

Through Spending Challenges & Streaks, PayPal 3.0 nudges when you need it, inspiring with gamified, dopamine-inducing feedback.

Social benchmarks.

With Peer Benchmarking, PayPal 3.0 compares your spending against relative peers for context and motivation.

Social cooperation.

Through Money Pools & Giving Groups, PayPal 3.0 connects you to friends to contribute and cooperate toward shared goals.

Rewarding

PayPal 3.0 incentivizes, celebrates, and rewards success at each major milestone along the journey.

Celebrate milestones.

PayPal 3.0 illustrates progress toward goals and milestones with dynamic visualizations and celebrates positive forward momentum with lively motion & animation.

Reward success.

By encouraging you to Build Your Own Rewards, PayPal 3.0 invites you to choose the incentives that motivate most, seeding along your journey.

03 - IMPACT

We set paypal's plans into motion.

We reached the end of our project with a high degree of momentum, alignment, and buy-in among PayPal's design & executive leadership.

Ueno wrapped its delivery in a tidy package; a branching story about real users interfacing with PayPal 3.0, and a phased sequental rollout plan to bring the app to life over time.

We were planning to keep the party going into 2021!

Turns out, 2021 had other plans for ueno.

That's a story for another case study :)

We wrapped our strategy into a branching narrative story and a sequential rollout plan.

Outcomes and Deliverables

Design, build and launch of Care/Of’s personalized supplement recommendation and delivery service

Collaborators

Gordon Sexton
 Interface Design 

John Sullivan Hamilton Design & Strategy Consult 
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Joseph Bergdoll 
Design & Front-End 

Scotty Weeks
 Front & Back-End 

Sebastian Bean 
CMS Development 
‍
Emmett Shine
Creative Director

Contributions

Product Management
Information Architecture
Experience Design

Team

Ueno, 2020

PAYPAL

In 2020, I worked with the brilliant team at ueno to create a brand new product strategy for PayPal's core native applications, guiding the company's evolution from a disparate collection of features into an integrated suite of products.