PayPal Debit Reboot Diary Study
Summary
August 2022 the PayPal Debit Card relaunched with new value props including a rewards feature. After a sucessful launch, the team was interested in learning what drew people to sign up for the debit card after the relaunch, since we had no marketing support. These results would be provided for future marketing of the card.
Team and Timeline
I worked with relevant design, content, and product partners. I also consulted two senior UX researchers throughout the study.
From kickoff to the readout, this project took roughly a month.
Research Questions
What motivated these customers to sign up for the debit card at this time?
What was their decision process?
How have customers have used the card so far?
What has been with overall experience so far & what factors have contributed to a positive / negative experiences?
Methodology
Diary Study via dscout
Split into 3 parts (each part had 8-14 questions):
Getting the card
Using the card
How it's going
We gave participants a week to finish all of the parts. Each part opened automatically after the previous one was completed.
We recruited 21 participants who signed up for the PayPal Debit Card in the last month (2 months since the reboot)
Analysis
While dscout has an analysis tool, I found it restrictive for my purposes, so I transferred much of the data into a spreadsheet on Miro.
Once all I entered all the data on Miro, I created an affinity diagram for each section. I started noticing trends, normally based on how the individual funded their PayPal account (and subsequently, their debit card.) I noted any early use challenges participants experienced, and any entries on related to our new rewards feature.
Results
Motivations
From my analysis, I uncovered three key motivations for getting the PayPal Debit Card. These motivations were typically based on their financial circumstances or experiences, or the way they funded their PayPal account. Each of these motivations were then associated with a particular avenue from which they discovered the PayPal Debit card. How they used their PayPal Debit Card also differed by their motivation for getting it. By uncovering these motivations, we could segment our Debit Card users into these three types.
Signup & Early Use Experience Challenges
We uncovered three main challenges that many of our users experienced since getting their card. These challenges were seen across user types, and were typically due to a lack of information. Some of these challenges had more obvious solutions which I recommended. For the challenges that didn’t have obvious solutions, in the readout as a group we discussed how we could go about solving these problems, or if more research needed to be done to learn more about these challenges.
These results were used in our marketing efforts, and in future research and product plans for the debit card. In a later research effort, these results were a significant resource in building a customer journey map.
Reflection
This was my first time leading a diary study (I previously helped with preparation and analysis for two studies lead by other researchers). I knew that it would be a lot of work, going through multiple round of analysis not to mention the quantity of data to analyze. I found this project incredibly rewarding. While I typically lean toward moderated studies, this provided so much value and insight into how these users understand and use our product and how it fits into their lives. We came in with one assumption and were completely wrong - which (personally, as a researcher) can be an exciting outcome. I’m really happy with this work and feel more confident in this methodology.
