make time for free think.

Fast pay (2010 - US20120158528A1)

NOT APPROVED

In 2010, PayPal was still very much eBay transactions and online sales. In person payments was barely in play. PayPal was born of innovation, and had a program to encourage its continued disruption - PayPal Innovation Labs.

Wesley Hsu - an engineer I’d been working with on various projects - came to me with a simple idea for in store mobile payments - create unique identifiers for PayPal merchant IDs. He needed design support for a Labs entry, and he thought of me. I jumped on it, and we brainstormed ideas. The identifier could be a QR code. It could be printed on bills. What if it connected to restaurant seating software? It just so happened that WeChat Pay and AliPay in China were onto the same payment thing.

It wasn’t until 2014 that restaurants starting integrating QR codes into their software, four years after we submitted our patent. While it never got approved - likely because of its vast coverage and numerous competing patents, it was a great experience that I’ll never forget.

Efficient Transactions at a Point of Sale Location

I helped introduce the QR code concept, restaurant seating integration, and put together the deck and presentation materials.

PayPal’s early legacy of 'leap ahead' innovation was the engine behind disrupting, then setting the standard, for the payments industry. When the company shifted its focus toward incremental improvements, it opened the door to a new wave of disruptors.

As a part of the Innovation Lab and Innovation Showcase teams, we pushed the boundaries, but most of these ideas were never built beyond the vignettes we featured in the Showcase.

One of my biggest professional regrets is not being able to take many of these ideas to market - ideas that other companies launched well after we laid out the initial concepts.

The lure was the curiosity and excitement of working with new technologies, especially mobile and wearables. We were challenged to disrupt the payment experience: to create a digital wallet that would replace the overstuffed wallets in people’s pockets and purses.

We experimented with many emerging technologies and ideas, experiencing both successes and failures. It still amazes me how many of those concepts are now part of everyday life—at events, in stores, online, and on the phones and watches we carry. When I think back to the people involved, I can’t help but smile: amazing humans, coworkers, and companions.

IT’S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS.

paypal here offline(2013)

NOT SUBMITTED

In an industry that revolves around results, you always feel a bit weird sharing work that can’t fit into some kind of success metric. But here’s why ‘the thought’ counts: your ideas are part of a larger personal process of innovation, where you continuously refine your own creative thinking. Keep at it, you’ll land on something.

Being part of the experience design organization, we were often talking to customers, in our research space, out in the field, or at their place of business. During discussions with customers who sold goods at outdoor events, the notion of connectivity would come up. Old school knucklebusters could get imprints of credit cards to be run later. But if you have a phone with no connection, what can you do?

I worked up these crude wireframes in a few minutes to illustrate the idea. I brought it to product management and engineering, both of whom thought it was a good idea worth exploring.

We ran into a few problems. PCI compliance was difficult back then, and it was determined that storing the credit card info was problematic (even if temporarily).

Further, card data security was already an issue for any payment processor in the mobile space, and PayPal was fighting a number of regulatory battles on that front. It was put on the shelf to be considered when PCI stuff was figured out.

A patent wasn’t even on the radar for me - even before the PCI consultation - but it was considered viable for that.

you champion the experience, not a design.

Account Level Holds (2011)

I hadn’t been at PayPal for more than.a couple weeks when I heard of PayPalSucks.com. The world of online transactions was rife with fraud, and our Risk group had to manage it well, or we’d all be out of a job.

The problem was, we took a reactive approach, letting predictive models and blanket policies freeze funds and piss off customers.

This was a problem our PM - Adam Braasch - was well aware of, so he worked closely with our UX team to solve it. We did research on the impact on customers, and Adam laid out the plan. We removed seller goals from payment holds, and instead introduced sellers to the whole process upon their first sale, not when a transaction was flagged.

I helped the team with research, supported them in the effort to change the experience, and advised on messaging.  

PayPal was a company that grew really big, really fast -- the kind of environment where teams cranked out new features constantly to keep our lead in the payments space. We could get away with "good enough" for a long time. But as we were growing into a mainstream consumer brand, we had to go back and reconcile all these disparate parts into a cohesive experience.

We had a room full of the smartest people I know, and it was still a challenge for us to get back to the basics of product and content design, and to step outside of our box to connect with the users.

C.A.R.E. (2013)

While Rachel is referencing a different project in the above quote, it is a great lead-in to the Compliance & Risk Enablement initiative. And by the way, Rachel was that smartest person in the room, but it was always coupled with kindness.

PayPal indeed grew fast, and grew in different countries with various needs. The Risk and Compliance groups formed separately, producing experiences that would restrict or make demands on our customers, but sometimes in very different ways.

Hendrik Kleinsmiede came into PayPal around this time, and we were on him pretty quickly about these inconsistencies. He was head of Global Design, so he had some sway to address this. He formed C.A.R.E., looking to create a shared framework that not only found efficiencies with the tech, but also improved the experience for our customers (who sometimes were asked to provide the same information at the same time, but from totally different requests!).

It wasn’t just that Risk and Compliance were two distinct groups - as to an explanation for the disconnects - they also had different charters. Risk was about minimizing losses, working from probability models. Compliance focused on satisfying regulations, applying rules and manual process.

The Risk group was centered in San Jose, and Compliance in Singapore. It was decided we’d send a small group out to Singapore for a meeting to tackle this large challenge. We shipped off a designer (Brian Folsom), writer (Janice Ishizaka), and a PM (Elizabeth Belda). Given my role on the project - I should have been there - but my wife was 8 months pregnant at the time and I made the call to stay behind.

The goal of the working sessions was to go through use cases - note conflicts, differences, best practices - and come up with a plan to establish a shared framework. The UX team did high level heuristics on the experiences, covering the flows, messaging, etc.

up and down the fidelity scale

A mistake that has been commonly made in design is to see fidelity as a linear progression (from napkin sketch to pixel perfect in a straight line). Now in 2026, most design organizations know better, but 10+ years ago that was not the case.

For C.A.R.E., we went up and down the scale when we felt it was appropriate. Some crude wireframes stayed always internal, while others took on higher visual fidelity, but the content was still not mature. We did this because they were used for design system guides, or when we had stand alone prototypes that needed more realism in feel, even if the content was still relatively immature.

Totally suss. Like I C.A.R.E.

I was issued 5 patents before breakfast.

Do you even have an approved patent bro?

Congrats on the morning patents Tyler!

Thanks for the question.

The answer is: I have two approved patents, but only one from PayPal. And it was really unexpected. Let’s take a look at it!

Solve once, help many?

X-Y (2012 - US10775964B2)

While it might seem I was sitting around scheming how I’d score another patent, it was honestly more about solving customer problems.

For “Selection and organization based on selection of X-Y position,” I had been listening to customers complain about managing all their refunds and disputes. 14 years ago, automation was not standard, particularly for small merchants. So, in my evolving UX mind, I centered on an interaction to help solve the problem. I had been thinking about an efficient way to pair an action with a transaction line item. I took the idea to Egan Schulz, the mobile design director at the time. I wanted his expertise on selecting actions based on tapping where a column and row intersected.

He had really good thoughts on how the interaction might work - and that was really useful. But then he said - “I think this is patentable.” I was shocked, as it seemed so obvious, so simple. And it was, but it also had not been patented.

We worked together on detailing out the interaction, and took it to our lawyers. I wasn’t optimistic, but by gum - yes, by gum - it was approved. And guess what? It has been extended to 2034. Who knew.

(p.s. This interaction never was used for PayPal refunds - unfortunately - but similar interactions appeared on Kanban boards and music playlist management. Maybe it solved someone else’s problem?)

Russell and I overlapped at PayPal around 2010-2013. During that period, I led a team of UED professionals through a reorganization design effort .



Those sort of efforts can be challenging with concerns about compromising existing performance, relationships, and processes that aren’t necessarily “broken.” In this case we were redesigning to create a more scalable, agile and operationally excellent organization which meant that processes that worked still had to be reconsidered with scale in mind.



Russell was part of our task force and focused more on “what we had to gain vs what there was to lose.”
Trying to inject Operational Excellence into creative processes can be a recipe for disaster, but Russell helped us navigate the balance. 


Working with Russell and the UED team was one of my favorite projects at PayPal!

PayPal taught me that innovation isn't a department — it's a mindset.

You were always either pushing an idea forward or killing one fast enough to try the next. Either way, you were moving.

Working alongside people like Russ reminded me that the best innovation comes from people who are genuinely curious — not just about the product, but about the people using it. That combination of empathy and ambition is what made PayPal a special chapter.