A content designer is the key tO FULLY unlocking the creative potential of product and UX TEAMS
I’m Kiran, a versatile and highly adaptable content professional with 15 years of experience.
I’ve honed my craft while working at industry leading companies such as PayPal, Symantec, CA Technologies, and Cognizant.
I was trained in business writing by a distinguished instructor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.
Hello!
Welcome to MY portfolio
These are my most recent projects from PayPal.
CASE STUDY: Simplifying Financial Accounting for Small business
Product
PayPal offers around 26 reports to serve various needs of merchants and consumers. This data is crucial to merchants for tracking their sales and expenses, filing their taxes, managing their business performance, and minimizing their risks.
PayPal reporting org is a global team of 14 product managers. This team is responsible for providing the financial accounting and transactional data to merchants and consumers. We have around 1 Million daily visitors on this product.
PROBLEM
We don’t have a proper framework for this product. The experience on this product is very dated. It was initially built for large enterprises (LEs), who rarely login.
Small businesses (SMBs) are not able to navigate through the reports. They don’t understand the purpose of each report, so they’re not using these reports.
As PayPal’s customers grow, their needs evolve, and their reporting requirements evolve too. The current product has not been able to keep up with the change. It’s high time it received an upgrade.
CONTENT GOALS
Understand the financial accounting needs of customers
Map existing reports to the needs of customers
Define a framework and IA for the product
Define each report
Create coach marks for first time use
Outcomes
15% increase in report downloads within 120 days
7.5% adoption of favorite reports feature within 90 days
Development of bold new ideas for next-gen reporting solutions
LEARNINGS
SMBs need a simpler way of procuring the data required for closing their books.
They don’t have time for operational tasks and want to focus all their time on making sales and growing their customers.
They expect PayPal to help them in doing their accounting and growing their business.
Case study: Building an accounting dashboard for SMBs
Product
PayPal provides a bunch of reports to help merchants with their accounting and tax filing needs. SMBs hire external accountants for balancing and closing their books. They have to log in to PayPal to gather the payments data requested by such accountants. This process involves finding the right report, generating it, downloading it, extracting the required columns from the download, and sending it to the accountant.
PROBLEM
SMBs generally work alone or with a very small staff. They want to spend all of their time on selling and making new customers. They prefer simple tools that meet their needs quickly, without getting too complex. They just need the high-level summaries instead of detailed transaction lists.
CONTENT GOALS
Identify the key data points needed by SMBs for balancing their books
Create a summary view that presents all these data points
Name the different parts of this summary view
Outcomes
All participants in the user research sessions loved this overview and confirmed it eliminates the need for downloading any reports, unless they have discrepancies.
Pilot launched on 24th August 2024, for 240K merchants. Initial metrics show promising customer response.
LEARNINGS
SMBs want to drill down into more details for certain items on the dashboard.
They want their accountants to be able to access this data directly, as secondary users.
Advanced users want integrations with third-party accounting software, like Quickbooks, to automate the accounting tasks.
Case study: reducing drop-offs in account activation
Product
Millions of merchants sign up for a PayPal account every day. PayPal has dedicated teams that work tirelessly to make the onboarding experience of these merchants seamless and easy.
After onboarding, a merchant must also set up various payment solutions in order to start getting paid. There’s something wrong with the setup process and PayPal has set up a team of specialists to look into it.
PROBLEM
Out of all the merchants who start their onboarding process, only 7% eventually activate their account. As per old research and feedback merchants don’t know which options they got and which of those are best for their business. Fees transparency is a big roadblock. We need more data to build a comprehensive setup platform. So we ran some experiments to test our hypothesis and learn more about the needs of merchants.
CONTENT GOALS
A clear picture of the setup options, products, and the efforts needed to complete the setup
Micro descriptions of all options
Reduce friction in the merchant’s decision-making process to see how this impacts the activation rates
Outcomes
20% increase in activation rate for one variation of the experiment
6-8% increase in other variations
LEARNINGS
Merchants are confused by too many payment options.
They don’t have a clear picture of what they get from each option and what it costs.
They want PayPal to guide them on what’s the best option for their business.
Past projects
Here are a few projects I completed at Symantec six years ago. Looking back now, I'm proud of how much my craft has advanced over the course of my career. You’re welcome to take a peek into that journey.