My Role: VXD Director
Project Goal: Create a Mobile Wallet Application for PayPal’s New York Shopping Showcase.
Project Description
PayPal’s New York Shopping Showcase is a place where new and innovative projects for brick-and-mortar merchants can be showcased. This particular app showed how merchants can take advantage of the forthcoming PayPal mobile wallet.
The design on the left was where the explorations were when I got involved. Although this used PayPal's color palette and a nice use of white space, it was not a design that I felt reflected the direction that PayPal wanted to go. I wanted to see something that was cleaner, more innovative, likely a more skeumorphic design, (applications that are designed to have elements of them that look or behave like their real-world counter-parts). In this case we wanted to reflect elements of a wallet, but we wanted that wallet to feel uniquely PayPal, not like your Dad's old wallet.
We instead decided to explore the look of high-end luxury cars and their interiors, a leather that was sexy, fresh, possibly white or light grey as type would read well over it in app form. We wanted stitching, but not too much, and the interface needed to look clickable. The design on the right is where we landed for the shopping showcase and it was a big hit with the press and public. The far right shows the base wallet background.
“This is *so* cool. A thing of beauty. You’ve achieved something I’ve been dying for us to start doing in our experiences which is to pick up on subtle aspects of the “wallet” metaphor that help drive that concept home to consumers and build comprehension, without being so literal that it just looks like we took a wallet and stuck it on a phone. It actually drives home the concept that we have recreated and enhanced the wallet for the future – keeping the elements and interactions that people understand and that make sense, but then enhancing and adding utility to it in a way that only PayPal could. I’ve been waiting for so long to see this come to life that it is literally almost bringing tears to my eyes. Beautiful!
You guys are really doing fantastic work. I love it.”
~ Sam Schrauger, Vice President, Global Product and Design