Design System + Branding + Marketing Campaign
Enhancing customer experience with a cutting-edge brand system for PayPal's web and mobile financial services.
Overview
PayPal embarked on a major redesign of its marketing website to align with its new brand identity and refresh existing design patterns. This initiative focused on designing a groundbreaking brand identity driven by user insights, enhancing usability and accessibility, and establishing a comprehensive design system as the single source of truth for UI and brand design—ensuring consistency, efficiency, and scalability across the organization. As one of the lead designers, I played a key role in driving this transformation.
Roles
Project manager
Product owner
Creative director
Lead experience designer (me)
3 Junior designers
Copywriter
2 UX designers
Skills
Branding
Design System
Prototyping
UI Design
Quality Assurance
Team Leadership
Timeline
Design & Testing:
2.5 duration
Year
2022-2024
Problem
The challenge is to help solve and explore how PayPal’s brand toolkit can be interpreted within the PayPal Digital Wallet product experience.
Currently, users aren’t recognized based on their needs and actions. Our goal is to enhance engagement and drive app adoption to achieve key objectives and results.
Solution
I collaborated with our team to understand the new brand elements in Paypal products through design exploration and experiments with shapes, patterns, and colors. We compared lifestyle images with product user interfaces to see what is effective and what is not. I also defined requirements for components for other designers to work towards.
Old design system
New design system
Objectives
Foundational Design System
Create a unique and clear brand color palette for the new design system.
Transform and mature PayPal color palette to reflect its growth into the financial services system.
Creation toolkit offering essential resources and tools for efficient and effective project development.
Craft a cohesive style and library of ownable illustrations bringing a consistent layer of life and tactility to the user experience.
Defining component systems, variables, variants, properties, and graphic styles as part of a cohesive design ecosystem.
I created a strong UI design system starting with a complete toolkit. This toolkit has all the needed PayPal required business graphics, components, styles, and resources so designers can quickly build user interfaces.
Delivery
All design changes were validated through rigorous multivariate testing against existing UI elements, with a focus on improving usability, accessibility, and business outcomes. Semantic research was conducted to understand how users perceived the brand in the absence of a defined identity, providing critical insights that shaped our direction.
Applying new themes and principles
PayPal Fastlane landing page designs.
Effortless, fast checkouts - Just log in with a one-time text code, review, and check out with a tap.
Developed and delivered go-to-market, CRM, and testing campaigns for the PayPal brand ecosystem, including PayPal Finance and the Mobile App. Collaborated with Marketing team and stakeholders to ensure alignment. Contributed to system design thinking and scalable solutions for the Brand Team.
Bringing the campaign to life
Ad Banners
Digital retargeting banners to promote PayPal Campaign
Build & Implement
Deployed through PayPal design system
We integrated all brand expressions with a velocity-adding design system that served as the single source of truth for all product design.
Develop meticulous motion guidelines
We utilized foundational motion principles to ensure animations and interactions are functional and add value to the user journey.
Planner flowchart organization
We created a flowchart to organize screens for PayPal requirements. It helped us visualize screen organization, enhancing understanding and design efficiency.
Contribution
Team growth & development
By establishing clear team goals and providing ongoing coaching, I cultivated a high-performing, motivated team that was instrumental in driving the project’s success.
Leadership
I was a design lead for a year with a goal to improve PayPal’s visual identity and launch. My leadership encouraged teamwork, feedback, and organization. My intention was to focus on user-centered design to create a consistent brand image that reflects PayPal’s values and improves user experience. I also organized team-building activities and outings throughout the project.
Cross-department coordination
I collaborated closely with the PayPal business marketing, product, and user experience teams to ideate, conduct workshops, and finalize effective design solutions. My coordination efforts were crucial in designing and clearly defining distinctive brand expressions that resonated with our target audience.
Ongoing support
Provided augmented UI design support, enabling teams to seamlessly integrate the new brand identity into their design workflows. This helped improve quality, consistency, and efficiency.
Results & impact
By 2024, PayPal design teams were fully utilizing the brand system which had become the definitive source of truth for UI and brand design, accelerating product development and reducing time-to-market.
Brand perception
Research post launch revealed that users in key regions perceived the new visual identity as more mature and better aligned with PayPal brand and mission to help users’ financial services.
Product consistency
The visual system improved visual consistency across all product and marketing surfaces, making the brand system simpler and more accessible to users and designers.
Impact on business
17.60% Increase into paypal.com/thank-you/ signup of total traffic
34,054 More lead generated from MQL Form Campaigns
1,252,488 more unique page views since 2024 launch