Design Chit-Chat vol.3 – Zeke Kuo

What is Design Chit-Chat?

With 43 million users, PayPay has become a popular service nationwide. One essential aspect that made possible the creation of such a great product is the diverse cast of Product Division members from over 35 countries. By bringing together people with top-notch technical skills and understanding the differences and commonalities of each other’s way of thinking, the team has transformed into a group that is capable of creating totally new concepts, approaches, and outputs. Design Chit-Chat is a series of interviews with members of the Design Team at PayPay to provide you with as intimate a picture of the team as possible and the spirit with which they go about their work.
This time, Zeke-san joined the interview. Make sure to also check another interview he appeared in!
“What’s your honest opinion on PayPay?” Vol. 2 Product Designer

What is your team and what does it do?

As the lead in the design team A, the main task for me is to manage every team member’s work. In the meantime, I am also in charge of P2P. which means the peer-to-peer transaction feature. I joined the project from the very beginning, after we launched P2P in March 2021, we are still iterating it and providing new features for our users on a 2 weeks sprint basis.

What made you become a designer?

I had a great passion for interior design when I was in high school. Always interested in creating a good living environment for people. Although digital media was my second option at that time. but when the iPhone came out, as someone who loves design and technology. it became a very easy decision that I want to be a UXUI designer at that time.

What projects have you recently worked on?

Recently, besides P2P. I am also working on building a design system for the design team. it has been a very good opportunity to create something for designers instead of consumers. Basically, when the design system is completed, designers will be able to save a lot of time to create new designs and PayPay will have more consistent UIUX as well.

How do you come up with ideas?

It is also good merit that we work with designers from very different backgrounds, we can all learn from each other. Apart from this, I like to use and try different kinds of apps even when I am not the target user. We need to be very sensitive to the trend of new apps, the more you use the better you know what is intuitive for users. Another interesting finding is when using those apps with really bad UX you will feel the pain points, next time you will also try to avoid those bad practices in your designs.

What do you prioritize when creating a product at PayPay?

For us designers, what we value the most I believe is the UX. and it is our responsibility to make sure that we don’t sacrifice UX when fulfilling the business requirements. I also think although every role has its goals to achieve, in the end, if the product is full of irrelevant information, users will not use it no matter how much cashback we give them.

What sort of challenges do you want to take on in PayPay?

I would like to challenge to get more real users’ feedback, keep iterating until we have no more bugs to fix no more good features to offer. Also, I am looking forward to seeing Japan becoming a cash-free country, and PayPay will be one of the reasons to make that happen.

A message for people considering a job at PayPay

I can’t speak for other teams but for the PayPay design team, I can say that it’s a super diverse, young, and fun team. If you are looking for a team that’s creative and makes a product for millions of users. PayPay Design is your top choice.

*The recruitment status is current at the time of the interview.

Author: Zeke / Supervisor: YAGI / Editor: Tak
*Employees’ affiliations are as of the time of the interview.