Context
PayPal Here launched in 2012 to go after Square: a dongle and an app so small merchants could take cards anywhere. PayPal had the scale ($145B in payment volume and 123 million active accounts in 2012) and was losing the counter-top relationship to a company a fraction of its size. The app sat at 2 stars. The reviews all said the same four things: too many taps to make a sale, navigation nobody understood, pairing failures with no way out, and an interface that looked like a web portal squeezed onto a phone.
I was one of several leads on a 20-person mobile design team, reporting to the VP of Design, split between Boston and San Jose, October 2012 to early 2014.
Contribution
I owned the sale flow, item catalog, reporting, onboarding, hardware pairing, and the dongle’s own interaction design on iOS and Android. The decision that outlasted everything else was building a usability lab inside the mobile team and hiring a researcher to run it. Before that, mobile decisions came from analytics and support tickets. It cost headcount and a room, and I spent political capital on both. Sessions with food truck operators, market vendors and independent retailers turned up findings that weren’t subtle: too many decision points in the sale flow, refunds people couldn’t find, pairing errors that ended in a phone call to support.
The redesign followed the findings. I cut the primary sale to its fewest steps, reorganized navigation around a merchant’s actual day (sell, then manage, then review), and gave every hardware error a recovery path on screen. The dongle work meant designing pairing and error states with the hardware team instead of after them. The lab kept running, so every change got tested before it shipped instead of defended after.
Outcome
2 stars to 4.5 within a year of the redesign, then 15M+ downloads across iOS and Android. The lab became permanent infrastructure for PayPal mobile. I left when the Boston office closed rather than move to San Jose.
