/02_DEV_PLATFORM // 2021 — 2023

Developer ToolsAIPayments

PayPal Developer Portal & AI Authorization

From 45k to 135k monthly developers — and +$1M merchant revenue

Showreel

Client

PayPal

Role

Senior UX Designer

Duration

21 months

Impact

3x portal traffic · +$1M merchant rev

/02The brief

Problem

PayPal's developer portal was the front door for integrators, but discovery, onboarding, and tool adoption were fragmented. Developers churned during integration; merchants in the US and EU were losing revenue to declined authorizations they couldn't diagnose or fix.

/03What we learned

Research

Before a single pixel moved, we ran 30+ developer interviews, a competitive teardown of Adyen, Square, and Stripe, and a diary study with SMB merchants. The data made the brief: developers trusted PayPal the brand but distrusted the portal — and that gap was costing merchants real revenue.

/FINDING_01slide

Where the old portal lost developers

Outdated design system65%

Confusing information architecture58%

Slow page performance42%

Accessibility gaps30%

Quantified from 30+ developer interviews and a heuristic teardown. The top two are design-fixable — the bottom two are tickets we filed with platform.

/FINDING_02slide

Where PayPal still won

Brand trust90%

Active developer forums54%

Recognized documentation as a weak spot47%

Willing to recommend to peers38%

Trust was the moat. Documentation was the leak — and the redesign concentrated on closing it without breaking the brand promise developers already believed in.

/COMPETITIVEslide

Who set the bar — and where

Competitor

Strengths

Weakness

Stripe

DocsCode snippetsTime-to-first-call

Pricing complexity at scale

Square

SubscriptionsPOS integrationOnboarding

Limited global coverage

Adyen

Global coverageAuth ratesEnterprise tooling

Integration ease for SMBs

PayPal

Brand trustMerchant basePayouts breadth

Dashboard & developer surface

Stripe set the bar on documentation. Square owned subscriptions. Adyen led on global coverage. PayPal had to out-design all three on the dashboard surface.

/THEMESslide

Two themes ran through every interview

/PERFORMANCE

API quality & velocity

Developers measured us in time-to-first-API-call, error rates, and how fast we shipped fixes. Anything that slowed them down — including the portal itself — was a tax on our reputation.

/TRUST

Developers as decision-makers

Developers weren't just implementers — they were the ones recommending payments providers to SMB founders. Earning their trust was earning the merchant.

These two themes became the lens for every prioritization call: if a feature didn't measurably move Performance or Trust, it didn't ship.

/GOALSslide

Seven measurable goals

01
−35%
Time-to-market for new integrations
02
2×
Testing-tool adoption per developer
03
3×
Monthly portal traffic
04
+30%
Developer tool usage per quarter
05
−62%
Developer integration errors
06
+$1M
Merchant authorization revenue lift
07
AA
WCAG compliance across portal surfaces

Each goal mapped to a single owner and a quarterly checkpoint. The 3× traffic and +$1M revenue lift became the project's North Star metrics.

/JOURNEYslide

Two journeys. One map.

Research

·Compare providers
·Evaluate docs
·Match developer

Pre-Integrate

·Create app
·Get keys
·Scope project

Integrate

·Sandbox tests
·First call
·Webhook setup

Post-Integrate

·Go live
·Monitor
·Diagnose

7 moments that earn or lose trust

Choosing a provider

Finding the right doc

Generating sandbox keys

First successful call

Wiring webhooks

Switching to live

Diagnosing a 500

End-to-end journey: SMB actions, developer–SMB interactions, and developer actions across Research → Pre-Integrate → Integrate → Post-Integrate. The seven numbered moments are where the redesign concentrated its budget.

/OPPORTUNITIESslide

Four How-Might-We bets

HMW · 01

How might we match SMBs with the right developer at the right moment?

→Developer–SMB matching surface inside the portal.

HMW · 02

How might we make integration complexity visible up front?

→Effort-and-scope estimator on every product page.

HMW · 03

How might we let merchants explore checkout visually before they commit?

→Interactive checkout sandbox with live previews.

HMW · 04

How might we give developers a scoping tool their PMs trust?

→Shareable project scope with auto-generated estimates.

Four HMW statements pinned to specific pain points — each one became a feature workstream that landed inside the year.

/BEFORE_AFTER

Landing → Dashboard. The old apps & credentials page asked developers to read marketing copy before getting to keys. The redesign opens with a personalized welcome, recent transactions, error logs, and monitoring — the four things developers actually return for.

Webhooks events, before & after. The legacy table buried failures inside dense sidebar navigation. The new design surfaces status, response time, and a resend action in one row — and 37% more developers used the tool within a quarter.

/04How we built it

Process

/STEP_01

Developer journey mapping

Mapped merchant authorization workflows end-to-end, identified friction points in onboarding, and built empathy maps and personas to align product, research, and engineering on the highest-leverage developer moments.

/STEP_02

Portal redesign + guided walkthrough

Streamlined the developer portal IA and built an in-product walkthrough so developers could learn and try new features without leaving context. Shipped in 4 months — traffic grew from 45,000 to 135,000 monthly visits.

/STEP_03

AI authorization tool

Designed an AI-driven tool that surfaces why a transaction was declined and how to fix it — improving merchant authorization rates and lifting revenue by $1M for US and EU merchants. Led the AI chat app that cut payment processing time by 14% and added $230k in revenue.

/STEP_04