MOBILE APP

I was the content strategist for PayPal’s new global mobile app. It was a privilege to play a part in achieving a wildly successful launch.

With a company of over 18,000 employees and countless product teams, a big priority was creating governance in the fundamental design strategy. This is easiest to see in the home screen, where we chose to divide app capabilities into nouns and verbs — what you can view, and what you can do.

Account management functions were the nouns — things like alerts, settings, personal profile, account balance, and account activity.

App features (or products) were the verbs — sending and requesting money, advance restaurant orders, retail innovations, donations, and more.

The rationale was that this reduced feature creep, and helped PayPal to avoid shipping an org chart. Product teams all still wanted prominent placement on the home page of the app… but the best interests of our users seemed much more rooted in something that was quickly navigable and obvious at a glance. No wading through lists of features, no being bombarded with new products or notifications. Plus, this paired beautifully with another broad goal: to minimize the use of Proper Noun Naming™, which requires marketing dollars to communicate and assumes users have the time and interest in all of this education. Last, this decreased the challenges faced with translating and globalizing an app that serves users of all types, just about everywhere in the world.

Naturally, the app has undergone visual redesigns in the four years since. But the fundamental strategy and infrastructure remain.

I'm incredibly proud of the results, but not surprised: the small team of talented designers made our product beautiful. And the engineers performed code sorcery to make interactions smooth, instant, dependable, and delightful.