A collaborative engagement with PayPal’s User Experience team to reshape how developers discover, learn, and build with PayPal’s APIs.
PayPal came to us because we’d spent years building with Stripe, Adyen, and other payment APIs. They wanted their developer portal to feel more like the platforms developers praise. We joined their User Experience team as an outside perspective, running collaborative workshops, testing concepts with real developers, and helping the team translate what they learned into a shipped redesign.
Developers have high expectations for API documentation. Stripe has set a standard the rest of the industry is measured against: clear hierarchy, thoughtful examples, credentials you can find without hunting, and a sense that the team on the other side understands what it’s like to integrate.
PayPal’s developer portal had grown organically over years of additions. The content was there, but the structure reflected how PayPal’s internal teams were organized more than how a developer actually worked. The team wanted to close the gap, and they wanted outside perspective from people who had built against the platforms developers already liked.
PayPal sought us out for our experience with Stripe, Adyen, and other payment APIs. We weren’t brought in to critique from a distance. We joined their User Experience team as collaborators, bringing patterns, benchmarks, and developer expectations from platforms the team already admired.
Rather than deliver a finished design over the wall, we worked alongside PayPal’s team in Miro and Figma, running sessions to pressure-test structure, flows, and information hierarchy. When the team proposed a direction, we tested it. When developers pushed back, we iterated. The work evolved in the open.
The original engagement was scoped as a single consulting session. It became several months of close work. Our team worked alongside PayPal’s UX team, returning to refine recommendations, review new prototypes, and stay involved as the redesign took shape.
PayPal’s developer portal launched with substantial structural and experiential changes informed by the engagement. The team has continued to iterate on the work, extending the direction with new features and content as the platform evolves.
The collaboration model mattered as much as the deliverables. By working alongside PayPal’s UX team rather than delivering from the outside, the recommendations landed in a way the team could carry forward on its own. An engagement that was supposed to be a single session became a months-long partnership because the work kept earning its place.
A 30-minute call. We'll listen, dig into the details, and tell you honestly whether we're the right partner, or point you to someone who is.
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