Paysafe Skrill Wallet

Paysafe was introducing their product into the US and I was brought on to oversee this experience. I was also tasked with raising the overall UX maturity of the organization, conducting remote ideation sessions and traveling to Vienna to conduct the first internal design sprint. While also helping define team structure, vision, mission and process, I was promoted to lead for the North American team for my efforts. I now lead a team of four product designers over worldwide payments with a focus on the US; the life blood of the company.

I conducted user interviews of US consumers with the UX research team and began with the merchant checkout experience as it was where most of our customers discovered our product. Competitive analysis showed a lack of parity in friction for our product and the likes of Paypal and Revolut. Usability testing revealed user intentionality and mental models which informed our UX content as to what users understood and expected. Our heavy focus on graphic based design left us with inadequate messaging. Users wanted to feel secure, which is expected when dealing with the transfer of money. We also battled a lack of brand recognition and value proposition. What set us apart? Why should they use us instead of something else? Users responded well to incentives like rewards programs, lower to no fee transactions. We also needed to understand that users did not desire to interact with our product, we were simply a means to an end. The less we interfered with their intended action (to begin gambling) the better. Navigating all of the regulatory, risk and compliance concerns made this a major hurdle. Users expected the same ease encountered with ecommerce transactions. Also, siloed project creation created knowledge gaps of the overall experience. Bringing all necessary parties to the table to knowledge share was long overdue. After understanding the end to end flow and user motivations, we streamlined the merchant deposit experience, to allow the user to deposit in 5 steps instead of 22. It was simply a matter of combining two products into a single branded solution, utilizing rails that already existed to allow instant deposits. Basically, we were restricting users from the simplest path for no other reason than our desire to capture them in our system, even if their deposit failed and caused them to abandon our product all together. We also streamlined the messaging to conform with the mental models the users had to build trust and security.

I also performed as lead on the crypto and stocks trading product. I was tasked with creating the new stocks trading experience. This team was without a product designer for 6 months and took some gentle massaging to recenter the users needs into their development roadmap. We knew there were complaints concerning ease of use and relevant messaging to mitigate user error. I introduced them to tangential findings we discovered concerning the US consumer and leveraged that into a proto-persona and preliminary prototypes. Competitive analysis defined table stakes for our MVP. I began an iterative loop, co-creating with the engineering and product teams, and running usability tests of our hypotheses. We were able to nail down must haves and nice to haves and adjusted the roadmap accordingly. We discovered several pain points in our current offering, which lead to solutions our testing found to be more intuitive, including the creation of a component to allow users to switch directly between stocks and crypto, as opposed to top level navigation buttons. We contemplated a business desire to combine stocks and crypto into one screen but quickly observed information overload and provided the necessary insights to pivot away. Our initial release occurred during a particularly volatile period with crypto, making it hard to see the true effect, as higher volatility always results in more engagement and acquisition. Still, we saw fewer complaints concerning the usage of the tool, which seems promising but will require further observation.