PayPal Bridge
Transforming PayPal’s global intranet into a refreshed, re-branded experience that facilitates personal connection and boosts productivity for all 20,000 employees.
PayPal asked Beyond to redesign their global intranet to create a more modern, effective, collaborative and productive platform for all of their global employees. We spent 13 weeks doing stakeholder interviews, user research, content strategy definition, product strategy, feature definition, wireframing and prototyping. Ultimately, we presented a product vision grounded in research that helped our stakeholders sell the idea to PayPal leadership, securing budget to move forward.
PayPal wanted to improve their intranet experience (that they call “The Bridge”) for employees so it was more of a holistic and helpful employee experience, rather than a bulky corporate communications tool. Inclusivity and pride were additional goals the client wanted to achieve in the redesign - they hoped the new intranet could reflect PayPal’s status as both a humanistic, purposeful, and mission-driven organization and innovative tech company. Our stakeholders needed to convince PayPal leadership that it would be impactful to allocate budget towards this internal tool.
I designed with all 20,000+ PayPal employees in mind, from junior customer service reps in the United States to senior management in Asia. Each had unique needs and pain points with The Bridge. I was the UX lead on the project and collaborated closely with engineering and strategy. I was responsible for leading discovery, defining a product vision, and bringing the vision to life through design, particularly for the landing page and search functionality.
To round out the search functionality, I also created individual office landing page to provide users a more personalized and helpful experience, transforming the Bridge into a hub where employees can feel more connected with their local teams. It featured calendar integration as well as intranet
To support our immersion period, I conducted quick best-in-class desk research to inspire our team and our client. Then, we (research & I) talked to project stakeholders to define goals and priorities, and we interviewed a diverse set of users globally across PayPal who represented “the extremes” of how, who, where and why employees were using the Bridge. We also created a quantitative survey for a broader set of users and analyzed current usage data. I created four different personas: The New Hire, The Global Collaborator, The Customer Champion, and The Tech Pro.
We leveraged these personas in ideation sessions and ultimately as a lens to show how the vision could come to life. They were also the basis for how I looked to redesign the user profile pages and features.
Concurrently, the Beyond team’s content strategist did a content audit, and I collaborated with them to create a new style guide. I led workshops to define product pillars, opportunity areas, and a product vision statement with the team. Using that strategic foundation, I redesigned key pages and created reimagined flows for our personas in wireframe format, bringing to life the new value the Bridge could unlock for global PayPal employees. I then turned the wireframes and flows into a higher fidelity with a brand identity and polished UI.
Ultimately we shared a collection of deliverables including user research insights, a prototype, personas, product vision and overall recommendations, and a content strategy. Together, these outputs gave our clients a roadmap for a reimagined, modern intranet that would help facilitate communication, collaboration, and inspiration on a local and global level - all while reflecting PayPal’s core values and brand vision. Our client leveraged our work at PayPal internally to secure more budget for the project, and due to the success of the initial vision, Beyond won an extended contract of about 12 months to continue work on developing this tool. I learned how to work around challenges like access to information and lack of adequate resources. As a result of this project, I also gained a perspective on how the modern workplace and employee experience will change in the coming years, and how to use design to make it more collaborative, productive and connected.
Although still live and used by all PayPal employees today, it is currently only accessible behind the PayPal Firewall.