PayPal
Millennial consumers constitute the largest population and available workforce in the world with many years left to live and work.
As a digital payments platform, PayPal wants to ensure they can properly manage their personal finances, so they can continue participating in the global economy. Can PayPal successfully pivot into the personal finance realm? I explored the possibilities.
The Objective
Design a new personal finance management feature that seamlessly integrates within PayPal’s current mobile application in iOS
The Solution
A new feature that allows users to easily and accurately categorize expenses to help them monitor their budget.
ROLE
UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer, Interaction Designer
TOOLS
Pencil + paper, Figma, Illustrator, Airtable, Trello, Mural, 850 Post-its + a Sharpie
DURATION
2 weeks (2020)
This project and its contents are fictitious and used for speculative purposes only.
SEE MY PROCESS ↓
01 | DISCOVER
Explore the problem space and understand PayPal’s challenges
Knowing personal finance and digital payments involve complex concepts, I conducted research to grasp an understanding of their markets, competitors, and users to identify the problem the new feature would solve.
Since PayPal may pivot its focus from just being a digital and mobile wallet to personal finance, I considered personal finance mobile apps as likely future direct competitors and interviewed PayPal users to ask about their spending and saving habits.
STATISTICS
TRENDS
Using an empathy map, further analysis of my interview observations revealed:
Millennials in their 20s need more assistance in managing their finances than those in their 30s.
KEY INSIGHTS
Participants in their 20s: save reactively (spend on what they need before saving leftover amounts)
VS
Participants in their 30s: save proactively (save specific amounts before spending freely)
02 | DEFINE
Decide which problems to solve and users to help
I decided to focus on the macro-insights I uncovered as I crafted a persona to capture and communicate all my research and direct my future design decisions.
I knew Tiffany has specific views regarding the issues identified and framed them as POV statements, which I then posed as How Might We (HMW) questions to facilitate ideation during remote group brainwriting sessions.
As the facilitator in group brainwriting sessions, I aimed to foster an uninhibited environment, so participants felt safe to explore and contribute their ideas.
Therefore, brainwriting sessions involved participants rotating around a Mural board anonymously to write as many solutions as they could while adhering to the rules of engagement I created.
Before brainstorming, I created a Mural board to facilitate the session.
Participants thinking silently during a brainwriting session.
Here are the fruits (i.e., ideas) of their labors at the end of all brainwriting sessions.
03 | DEVELOP
Build the new feature based on business strategy and user needs
I identified product goals to help me sift through ideas and prioritize product features that:
01 work closely together and
02 would provide PayPal with a foundation for future development of more personal finance features.
The new feature would enable users to easily and accurately categorize expenses to help them monitor their budget.
Capabilities
- Customizable expense categories
- Set rules and monitor performance
- Visible performance cues
Future benefits
- Own collected costumer data
- Enable data analytics
- Enable data visualization features
- Increase data accuracy
I drafted PayPal’s application map to visualize how the new feature would integrate into its existing information architecture.
My goal was to ensure the user is aware of the new feature as they enter the app and could interact with it from different parts of the information architecture.
Using flow diagrams to map interactions and decision points in major tasks involving the new feature helped determine content and feature placement to direct users in completing major tasks.
04 | DELIVER
Validate and improve usability before deployment
To test the new feature’s usability and seamless integration into PayPal’s existing information architecture, I create a high-fidelity prototype, hoping the fidelity would prompt real PayPal users to provide more accurate feedback about the new feature integration.
By creating an affinity map with my observations, I identified the users’ main frustration: assigning an existing expense category to a specific expense.
During testing, participants expressed they expected to tap a button to confirm their selection, so I prioritized this revision based on the effort required to make the revision and the impact the revision would have on the new feature’s usability.
After revising the high-fidelity wireframes and prototype, PayPal could help people like Tiffany envision the functionality and benefits of its new expense categorization feature. Try it out and let me know what you think!
CONCLUSION
What I learned
Addressing needs is more important than innovation. Since PayPal wants to pivot into personal finance, it needs to refine its expense classifications. While not an innovative feature in itself, it addresses user needs and frustrations, is the foundation of many personal finance apps, and would allow PayPal to build more robust features in the future.
Users orient themselves in an app by going back home. Therefore, it’s important to consider the levels of screens or pages from the home screen/page in any design.
Integrating a new feature into an existing product may force you to follow design patterns you don’t agree with. Not every app or website has everything figured out, so it’s important to notify relevant stakeholders about potential improvements.
My next steps
Hand-off current revised prototype to developers
Work on lower priority revisions
Build out additional screens for expense summaries, metrics, alerts, and push notifications
Monitor for and adapt to changes in the market and user needs, motivations, goals and frustrations