Is this even legal?
At PayPal, I was the Senior Content Designer responsible for the Digital Wallet — the space where PayPal users keep all their “financial instruments,” like credit cards, bank accounts, gift cards, rewards, etc.
The main project we did was the Digital Wallet reskin, which sounds pretty straightforward. We were changing the “paint job” of the wallet, not so much the functionality. But we used this opportunity to streamline content that wasn’t working, and update content to adhere to current guidelines.
Sounds easy, right? Not so fast.
PayPal operates on all 7 continents. Every territory has its own financial laws, with stark differences between regulatory environments.
The rules for currency transfers, negative balances, and the ways financial instruments can and cannot be used vary from place to place.
Even though we weren’t changing any functionality, we were still changing the way some of the content appeared. And even changes as minute as going from title to sentence case required a meeting with a lawyer. Early on, it became clear that my responsibilities would have much more to do with securing legal approvals than designing content.
So secure them I did!
Accommodating regulatory, geographical, and linguistic concerns, we created individual flows for specific markets, and set up incremental walkthroughs for over 20 legal teams.
Why, though?
When I got ahold of the Digital Wallet, it was littered with content written in passive voice. I aimed to root it all out replace it with active voice.
Changing “make a transfer” to “transfer funds,” seems simple, but it requires idiomatic translation into various languages, and shifting the tense could fundamentally alter the meaning in a non-English language.
Credit card rewards typically change on a quarterly basis. So in an effort to streamline the legal approval process, I created a template for credit card rewards language. It worked like this:
Earn [what] per [amount] spent [where].
Using this format, legal teams didn’t need individual meetings for every updated card every 3 months. I could just send a list of changes.
One of the lawyers at PayPal