The legendary PayPal referral program has been reincorporated into the brand new PayPal app.
PayPal's referral program has brought up PayPal since its beginning. From the initial user base of 24 people, the referral program achieved 7% daily growth with a cost of $20 per acquired user. The user base doubled every 10 days since the introduction of the referral program, and PayPal managed to attract thousands of users in just five months.
Brand new design language, a new home for the referral program.
Previous development of the Refer a Friend experience was outsourced to a third-party developer, and it was not consistent with PayPal's new design language which launched in 2015.
The Value Added Commerce team decided to make a strategic move of reincorporating the friend referral program with the new PayPal design pushed in early 2016, and to enhance the friend referral distribution stream.
Competitive analysis
First, I conducted a competitive analysis on other friend referral programs of other services that achieved similar type of organic viral growth.
This allowed me to get a sense of the different referral distribution streams and decide which ones are popular these days and what's outdated.
User flow
PayPal friend referral program is dependent on a 'Member-Get-Member' (MGM) Promotion. Only when the MGM promotion is active will the user receive the $25 PayPal credit for each sign ups. To compensate for this limitation, I carefully constructed a user flow which includes the MGM Promotion variation and also the different referral distribution streams.
Wireframe iterations
I focused on two key values while designing the Refer a Friend experience: diversifying invitation streams and improving efficiency by allowing multiple invitations at once.
Initial Wireframe Concepts
Wireframe iterations focused on testing out different ways to represent send email, copy link, and share on social media. We ran user-testing to see which combination of icons and texts conveyed the meaning of each functionality most intuitively.
Final Hi-Fi Wireframe Workflow
After I finalized the hi-fi wireframes, I organized the wireframes into the workflow format, so that I could present the product to other designers and engineers and explain how the product works logically and effectively.
