North Star Vision for Toast Account
Proposed Q2 2024
Overview
Following various research studies conducted within the merchant lending space, my research partner and I identified an underlying pain point when it came to discovery and adoption of PayPal tools and services for small and mid-sized business (SMB) merchants.
Using the SMB lending space as an example, I proposed the following concept of centralized hubs to call attention to and address merchants’ need for context and guidance when it came to discovery and adoption of PayPal tools and services, particularly when it pertained to products with less visibility within the merchant account.
This concept builds on the work highlighted in PayPal Loan Servicing Framework.
My role
Lead designer
Platform
Responsive web
Skills
Information architecture, taxonomy, design facilitation, stakeholder buy-in
Problem
Despite offering many tools and services to accommodate SMB business needs, PayPal products aren't all consistently integrated and discoverable for merchants. SMB merchants often struggle to discover tools and capabilities they need to support and manage their businesses within their PayPal merchant account. Many merchants who discover the right product by chance still find it difficult to recall how they came across that product, or how they might access it again in a new session. As a result, merchants often end up looking to other entities to supplement or replace what they couldn't easily and quickly find in PayPal.
Goals
Customer
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Improve intuitiveness of the merchant account structure to increase discoverability of tools where merchants would expect to find them.
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Flatten the merchant learning curve at discovery and adoption of new tools by establishing templates and recognizable patterns from pillar to pillar.
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Help clarify each product's purpose and how the merchant might leverage it for their business by unifying relevant features and experiences under intuitive naming conventions.
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Help ground new and returning merchants within their merchant account experience so they can easily way-find from any point in the experience.
Business
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Streamline engineering and design efficiencies across product portfolios.
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Establish a new IA framework that will serve as a template across all product spaces.
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Increase cross-product collaboration.
Challenge
Rapid changes made as products evolve are often communicated ineffectively internally, causing big disconnects to develop between the main account experience and various integrated products.
Products on the periphery (such as the merchant lending products) are often left to shoehorn their needs into a framework that fails to accommodate their requirements in customer centric ways. Over time, the increasing compromises have resulted in quilt-made outcomes for the PayPal merchant account experience.
Process
Explorations informed by learnings from a previous UX audit of the business loan servicing experience
1
Assess navigational IA in PayPal's SMB merchant account experience to identify areas of disconnect and redundancy.
2
Illustrate the concept of a centralized hub for discovery and management of products and services within a shared pillar using small business lending as an example.
3
Circulate hub concept and gain buy-in from product and design leadership for additional product spaces.
4
Run research studies to establish foundational insights on merchant expectations and behaviors with account navigation and to gather feedback on the hubs concept.
Current State
The merchant lending space consists of two small business loan products:
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PayPal Working Capital, a flexible loan repaid with a share of PayPal sales
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PayPal Business Loan, a standard term loan repaid with weekly payments
Because of their origins (the former a quick concept launch, and the latter an acquisition), both products exist on respective micro-sites with disconnected navigation from the main PayPal merchant account.
In the lending space, net new merchants and prospective borrowers are largely left to discover their lending options through direct marketing and organic search, while active customers are redirected to an external experience via entry points with little context as to where the menu item will take them.
Knowing merchants don't identify PayPal loan products or services according to the branded names, scaling these entry points as the suite of lending products grow and evolve have proven to be a challenge.
Like lending, other products in the SMB merchant account are grouped into respective pillars. Each pillar is represented by a "mega-menu" which is responsible for much of the navigation and product discovery for the associated products and actions.
Unfortunately, the structure and taxonomy of each mega-menu offers very few contextual clues for merchants to understand what lies beyond the label. Categorization and labels are not very intuitive to most small-business merchants yet it requires them to commit two clicks and a page reload before they are able to gain any context.
Hypothesis
Providing a centralized location of all lending products will reduce the cognitive load placed on merchants in discovery and engagement with the suite of PayPal products.
This concept of a centralized location for relevant products and services can be expanded across other product pillars housing similarly complex suites of products and services to unify the merchant experience.
User Types
Net new borrower
I have never borrowed with PayPal and need to discover the lending options available to me. I may need guidance on choosing the right loan for my business.
Returning borrower
I need to understand my lending options now that I’ve paid off previous loans with PayPal. I may want to reference my previous loan history for bookkeeping or to inform my next decision.
Active borrower
I need to understand the current state of my open loans so that I can take action as needed. I want to be aware of any additional funding available to me now or especially as I near completion of my active loans.
Proposal
I proposed the concept of a Financing hub fully embedded within the main merchant account experience to give new, returning, and active borrowers one central location to access, learn about, and manage their funding options.
Replacing the mega-menu eliminates the need for merchants to make a decision or commit to a product upfront. This also reduces the need for merchants to recall how to access entry points into their various loans and leaves the door open for the hub to scale to accommodate additional business credit options.
With this hub concept, merchants can:
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Monitor all active loans and keep a pulse on progress and cash flow without opening multiple dashboards.
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Access the in-depth servicing experience for a specific loan when action is required.
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Reference previously closed loans for bookkeeping or to inform decisions.
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Learn about loan agnostic actions they can take on their account to improve eligibility on future loan applications.
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Gain an understanding of what additional or new lending options are available to them at any given time, and be alerted to special offers when they become eligible.
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Potentially access insights and recommendations provided by PayPal in the future.
After an initial round of sharing out this concept to positive feedback, I worked with colleagues on our Marketing and Payments product teams to conceptualize hubs for their pillars. These exercises helped to vet the concept and stress test a complete sunset of the legacy mega-menu by transitioning services previously hidden behind links into respective hubs.
Outcome
My proposal kicked off a series of impactful conversations with several design and product teams that have helped inspire effective communication as we work towards presenting PayPal solutions more cohesively.
Since socializing this proposal, several teams have launched research studies to further investigate how we might restructure, design and implement hubs across respective product pillars. As of October 2021, a design task force has been formed to explore and establish a standardized merchant hub framework.
I’m proud of the ways this project helped establish a new way of working between designers across products. Inspired by common pain points that were too frequently de-prioritized, descoped, or backlogged, this project also became a huge catalyst to demonstrate the importance of good information architecture to many of our partners across the merchant account space.