PayPal Here
PayPal Here overhaul: 2-star to 4.5-star, 15M+ downloads
The Problem
PayPal Here launched in 2012 as a direct response to Square: give small businesses the ability to accept card payments through a mobile app and a pocket-sized dongle. The premise was sound. The execution wasn't. By the time the team I joined began work on it, the app sat at 2 stars in the App Store. The reviews told a consistent story: too many taps to complete a sale, confusing navigation, hardware pairing failures, and an interface that felt like a web portal had been ported to mobile without rethinking a single flow. Square was clean and fast. PayPal Here was neither.
The competitive stakes were real. PayPal was processing $145B in annual payment volume and had 100M+ active accounts, but Here was losing the ground-level merchant relationship to a much smaller company. Fixing the app wasn't a design polish project. It was a business-critical overhaul.
The Work
As one of several mobile design leads on a 20-person team, my ownership spanned the full feature set across iOS and Android: the transaction flow, the item catalog, the reporting and history views, onboarding, hardware pairing, and the card reader dongle itself. Working across the physical and digital in parallel was a constraint that shaped every decision. The dongle's form factor, its pairing UX, its error states all had to be designed in concert with the app rather than after the fact.
The most significant structural investment of this engagement was building and staffing a dedicated user research lab, one of the first on a mobile payments team at this scale. Before that infrastructure existed, design decisions were made from analytics, intuition, and occasional user feedback that filtered through customer support. The lab changed the model. We ran structured usability sessions with small business owners: food truck operators, market vendors, independent retailers. The patterns that emerged weren't subtle. The transaction flow had too many decision points. Inventory management was buried. Refund handling was genuinely difficult to find. Hardware pairing errors had no recovery path that didn't require a support call.
The redesign collapsed the primary transaction flow to its minimum viable steps, restructured the navigation around the actual merchant workflow (sell first, manage second, review third), and built real error handling into every hardware touchpoint. The research lab ran continuously throughout, validating assumptions before they became shipped features.
The Outcome
The app moved from a 2-star to a 4.5-star App Store rating in under a year. PayPal Here went on to accumulate 15M+ downloads across iOS and Android. The research lab built during this engagement became a permanent infrastructure investment, influencing how PayPal approached mobile product decisions beyond Here.
