PayPal Redesign @webbruce Can you believe the PayPal dashboard doesn’t give you the information you need quickly and efficiently? Good luck searching for a transaction four months ago to make sure a client paid for his delivered work or having a non-tech user understand all the options to tweak their account. PayPal processed around $14 billion in transactions last year and you would think a modern, usable dashboard would be necessary to help grow that total. This is why I researched, wireframed and designed a new dashboard for PayPal users to enjoy.

I first created a plan to attack this project. While writing down a few steps, I also knew that I wanted to interview a few non-tech PayPal users on their most used features.

I found an interesting article about the UX of business-focused web applications, which lead me to identifying my audience through Quantcast. Through the interview process, I asked frequent users what information and features they found most useful in PayPal. I also asked what new features/information they’d like to see, but that didn’t return any results from my four participants.

I printed out my PayPal dashboard to able to start removing features of PayPal. I wanted any buttons that were not frequently used (according to my interviewees) to be hidden in a dropdown menu or other submenus. This step helped organize my thoughts for a few wireframes and made me think about responsive characteristics, retina images, UI patterns, icons and more. You can almost think of this step as a “mobile first” strategy to hide any features that wouldn’t be on a mobile view of PayPal.

Next was the wireframing stage. I found a few great UI patterns on Google that I could use in sketching out a dashboard. I created a few options based on modern design/layout trends, importance of the information at hand and frequency of the usage of each feature. On the side you can see notes about each sketch. I ended up choosing to use a lot of Version 2 because I felt it displayed important information prominently, improving usefulness of existing features and showed frequently used features clearly.