Navigation and IA: PayPal for Business
Problem: Customers were having trouble finding key information on the PayPal for Business site.
Challenge: We were tasked with revising the information architecture (IA) and creating a new site navigation that would make relevant information more discoverable. This was part of a larger site redesign initiative.
UX Research
Adrian Garcia
Design
John Choura
Product Manager
Maja Bradaric
Content
Doan Nguyen (me) & Jane Horowitz
Dissecting the old navigation
There were several key issues with the original navigation that we wanted to address:
Many of PayPal’s popular products aren’t surfaced. Business owners need to choose a scenario and dig through levels of pages to find what they’re looking for.
Small business and enterprise pages are housed under the same tab, but the user journeys for these two sets of merchants are very different.
The navigation labels aren’t optimized for search—which means these terms might not be what business owners are expecting as they browse.
Based on these goals and previous user research insights, we crafted four information architecture variations and conducted a tree test.
The IA concepts ranged from product focused to scenario focused. After refining the ideas you see on the left, we presented customers with various scenarios and asked them to find relevant information using one of the variants.
Here are some of the questions we asked them.
“Where would you go to find out how much PayPal charges for processing each payment received on your website?”
“You’re shopping for a new card reader for your store. Where would you look for more information?”
“A competitor recently started letting customers pay for purchases on their website in installments. Where would you go to find out if PayPal offers something similar?”
“You’re a freelance graphic designer looking for an easier way to create and send bills to your clients. Where would you expect to find more information about this?”
Applying our learnings
Once we landed on a winning concept, we started transforming the IA into a viable navigation. Some key improvements include:
Surfacing top products based on business priority
Separating small business and enterprise into two separate territories to help streamline each experience and adding contextual CTAs to each section
Crafting clearer navigation labels using our product knowledge, SEO research, and user insights. We brainstormed new ideas for historically misunderstood terms and tested them against each other
For example, we discovered that “third-party integrations” made more sense to users than “partner directory” and “fees” was a more popular term than “pricing”
The results (2 months post launch)
All retained and most new small business pages showed a positive uplift in click through rate (CTR) and an increase in users landing via the navigation
The new Online Checkout page, which covers PayPal’s flagship payment solution for small business, was receiving 30% of its traffic from the redesigned navigation