PayPal rewards

2020 - 2021 • design lead • UX design

 

OVERVIEW

SKIP TO: RESEARCH • VISION & MVP • NEXT STEPS

In the PayPal mobile app previously, there was a rewards hub that displayed credit card rewards that can be used at PayPal checkout.

 
Previous Iteration.png

While the previous design incentivized users to use their credit card rewards through PayPal, it did not actually show PayPal’s own rewards. PayPal actually many different types of rewards developed by different departments as a way to incentivize users and reduce churn. Each department developed their own incentives in isolation, and none of them are exposed in the mobile app. No one had ever looked at these rewards as a whole.

“How might we engage users with rewards at PayPal?”
 

Collaborators

Mei Chen - user research

David Park - content designer

Gail Batac - product lead

Sebastiano Armelli - engineer lead

 

RESEARCH

SKIP TO: OVERVIEW • VISION & MVP • NEXT STEPS

 


A holistic look at 9 reward systems at PayPal

What type of rewards exist at PayPal today? I asked all designers who have ever worked on an existing reward flow to put their files in Figma and we reviewed them together.

Teams had invented rewards ad-hoc, without any concept of rewards as a whole. As of writing this, there are 9 different reward variants, and different ways to earn and spend them. Some examples:

  1. QR rewards - check out with a QR code in-stores, collect stamps on a punchcard to get cash back rewards.

  2. Gold - inherited from Honey Gold - shop with participating merchants to get points that can be redeemed to cash.

  3. PayPal specific balance - rewards given for marketing incentives such as referring a friend. Cannot be transferred to a bank, must be spent at check out online.

  4. PayPal Mastercard cashback - 3% back for shopping at PayPal with their branded credit card.


 
 

Existing research synthesis

I synthesized existing research from PayPal, as well as industry research from credit card, travel and e-commerce.

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TOP USER NEEDS

1. I want to easily understand how much I have in rewards

2. I want to know where I can spend these rewards

3. I want to be rewarded for doing normal everyday things like shopping

 

PRODUCT WORK

SKIP TO: OVERVIEW • RESEARCH • NEXT STEPS

 

Mapping a north star

I hosted a workshop with stakeholders where we reviewed research and gathered competitive analysis, with the end goal of finding successful patterns.  We looked at rewards centric apps such as Starbucks, who was very clear with how to track, earn, and use rewards under one system.  

 
 

We came to the agreement that 9 rewards system with different ways to use and spend rewards was too complicated, and that we needed to narrow down. I then came up with designs for a new PayPal Cash back rewards system for a pitch deck to review with leadership.

 

When a user uses a PayPal credit card, shopped, invested, or completed incentives through PayPal, they would be paid out through the same cash back program.  This can then be redeemed into anything on PayPal, such as buying crypto or donating.    We would also track lifetime rewards activity to celebrate with a user where they have earned their rewards.

This was well-received with the design leadership, who have taken the idea and furthered discussions with business, growth, marketing, and other departments.  However, PayPal could not suddenly hault all its initiatives, incentives, and merchant agreements.  We needed to figure out the intermediary steps toward this north star. 

 

Launching as part of the PayPal super-app

At the time, PayPal was planning to launch a redesigned “super app”. After getting leadership buy-in from the pitch deck, we were asked to join the launch.

The new super app, meant to be a total digital wallet that included all your financial tools such as investing and banking

The 2 sprint MVP

Engineering resources were short however, so we were constrained down to what we could do in 2 sprints. At minimum, we needed a way to test the idea that users would find value and engage in rewards when there is a place that aggregates and helps them track rewards. This is what we came up with:

 
 

Leveraging an existing framework with engineering

For scalability reasons, we wanted to have each team built the reward systems to be responsible for building their own reward pages in the reward hub. But it was important to create a template that would house all the rewards in one place with a consistent look and feel, and that future teams could leverage. However, 2 sprints was not enough to build a new framework. After talking to my engineer team, we decided that we could modify an existing card art framework we had built out for another purpose, which cut our sprint estimates from 8 sprints down to the desired 2 sprints.

I then worked with each respective team to come up with how to present rewards in a consistent way. We developed a template for the introduction page and the rewards detail page as well.

 
 

Badging the new rewards hub

During the research phase, we learned that users had differing desires when it came to being notified of about rewards; some wanted a push notification for everything new, some never wanted to be notified at all. Notification cadence is an e-commerce industry-wide problem; many users would dump all their offers in a junk email box when it became overwhelming. We decided to badge the new rewards hub in-app instead, so push and email notifications can still be primarily focused on critical PayPal alerts.

RESULTS & NEXT STEPS

SKIP TO: OVERVIEW • PROCESS • DESIGN

Pitch deck results

Due to our pitch deck around our north star, the problem of our complex rewards ecosystem has been socialized through out the company. Currently we are undergoing business analysis on the specifics of what type of rewards currency would be best, and making strategic decisions on which rewards types to cull.

MVP results

The MVP of rewards hub was launched in October 2021. Some key performance metrics to measure engagement and value added:

  1. 13+% click through rate on our incentive carousel, compared to 2.3% on the home page. I surmise that users interested in rewards are more willing to engage in any incentive offers we may have.

  2. 43.1% click through rate for add reward card, which is a x4 lift from previous.

  3. 2x lift on daily traffic to rewards hub through badging (173k to 379k daily users)

 
 

Next steps

As rewards hub is a new concept, ~90% of global users currently see an empty state. Especially outside the US, a user might not be very engaged in PayPal reward incentives. Can we have a better onboarding experience?


60% of users are confused whether they earn rewards through PayPal when paying with a credit card. Many users are surprised that you can buy gift cards or donate your rewards. Can we help users comprehend how the reward systems work?


Design workshop ideas and initiatives

During this process, I ran a design workshop with designers and product owners to come up with new ways we can make rewards more engaging. Some ideas we came up with:

Wishlist - From research we know that many users are saving up rewards for a specific goal. Wouldn’t it be cool if users could make a wishlist of items that they want to use their rewards for? Well, PayPal had already acquired that technology through Honey, who has a product called Droplist where a user can save things that they want to buy and watch for price drops. We can service Droplist in PayPal and alert users to when they can buy their wishlist items with rewards that they’ve earned.

 
 
 

Hero placement for new ways to earn - We plan increase engagement by dedicating a tab to ways to earn rewards. We plan badge the tab when there’s a new way to earn, and give that new campaign hero placement at the top of the page.

 
 
 
 

Rewards activities - with so many reward systems, there’s a volume of customer complaints on when a reward is earned or used. We are bringing in a reward activity widget to help users track the rewards they specifically earn and burn. This was ranked the most useful feature a user would want in our research studies, and they have also requested the ability to filter by date and reward type.

 

In the coming months, I will be going through design reviews with respective dependency teams to get these initiatives prioritized for next year.