Paypal & the linking of a bank account

Once in a while we have to link our bank account to an online service - say, to set up direct deposit, or pay utility bills.  it's a straightforward but annoying exercise. Every time I go through it, just like most sane people, I can never remember the bank's routing and account numbers and have to look them up.  To make sure we can't just link to some random account and take money from it, these services, thankfully, require us to prove that we have access to it.  The method to do that is as simple as it is clever: the service makes a couple of tiny deposits into the account, and asks us to tell it what those exact amounts were.  If our answer matches the deposits that were made, our access is confirmed, and we are good to go.  Otherwise, no transfers to or from that account are allowed.

It's a road well traveled.  Every service does it more or less the same way, including Paypal - where I recently had to link a bank account. After completing the initial setup, I waited for the micro deposits to be made, and kind of forgot about it.  Paypal helpfully reminded me via email "hey, your deposits should be ready... go check your bank account":

There was something weird about the email: it looked like it had a bunch of blanks instead of dates and times.  A surprising glitch for Paypal, but I wasn't super concerned - in my experience, this can happen for a variety of technical reasons.  On the plus side, however, the email conveniently included a set specific step-by-step instructions to confirm the bank account, including the clear and unambiguous direction to "Log in to your PayPal account and click Confirm Bank Account".

Less suck

I dutifully followed the instructions, expecting to see some kind of link to confirm the bank account.  Alas, there was nothing like that on the landing page.  Hmmm.  Perhaps, the instructions are out of date, and it's no longer on the landing page, but one of the menus must definitely have it.  I quickly scanned the main navigation menu, checking every menu option:

There was no Confirm Bank Account link, a mention of bank accounts, or anything that would remotely indicate a relationship to bank accounts.  The next step was to check the account menu - pretty much every online service has one, and more often than not it it hidden under the profile icon, a photo, or the user's name in the upper right hand side.  I opened it - the most likely menu options were Profile Settings and Account Settings:

A quick check confirmed it was not in Profile Settings, which left Account Settings. Impatiently, I opened it... and didn't immediately see any relevant options:

Luckily, there was a search box - I was both excited and surprised.  Settings pages almost never include a dedicated search; Paypal product team must have decided that the inherent complexity of the section warranted having a dedicated search.  I quickly used it to search for "confirm bank account" - only to discover that it didn't match anything useful.  I then searched for a shorter, more obvious word "bank" - and again, a total miss with zero matches.  I was annoyed and frustrated - it wasn't a stretch to assume that the search should pull up what I needed. But it did not.

A minute or two of messing around finally got me to the right place - turns out, the right option was in the Account sidebar menu all along, but ended up hidden because of the size of the window.  There, under the "Money, banks and cards" menu option were my linked bank accounts, including the new one in need of confirmation.  In hindsight, I felt silly that I hadn't immediately scrolled down all the way to see the rest of the menu.  But then it occurred to me: here I was, an experienced, tech savvy product manager, and it took me a minute to find something that should have been instantly discoverable.  What if it were someone less experienced?

Product manager's thoughts

Someone less experienced, like my parents.  They have enough trouble navigating their devices, even when they have explicit and clear directions.  Their first challenge would have been trying to match the email instructions to the website.  Chances are, they would have gotten dead-ended here, not knowing where to look next.  Maybe, just maybe, they would poke around in the menus - again, to find nothing helpful.  Even if they stumbled on the Account Settings section and searched for "bank" - which in and of itself would have been a miracle - they would have found nothing.  At that point, guess who would be the asshole talking them off the ledge on the phone?  That would be me.  I would be Paypal's unofficial, unpaid customer support - the role that is very familiar to me.

I suspect that Paypal has a strong, capable product team that cares about the service and the customer experience.  I also know that as products get more complex and teams grow, complexity goes up, and increases the chances of missing things here and there - outdated email instructions, faulty search.  I myself have lived and continue to live in a glass house, and no team out there is immune from misses like this one.  A rigorous testing process, however, especially one based on scenario testing - a sequence of required steps to complete a task - should have caught the issues.  Paypal is a mature enough service that should have prevented this from happening.

More awesome

Stating the obvious, the following things should have been in place to make this a quick and straightforward experience:

• up to date email instructions, ideally with an embedded link to the appropriate section
• on the landing page, a banner message or another signal indicating an important pending task
• the search in the Account Settings section must return all matching results