Design Chit-Chat vol.7 – Aerin Riangkruar

What is Design Chit-Chat?

PayPay has become a national service with 42 million users, and one thing that is indispensable in its development is the presence of product members with rich personalities from more than 40 countries around the world. The process of understanding the “differences” and “commonalities” in each other’s thinking one by one has transformed us into a team capable of creating ideas, approaches, and outputs that have never existed before.

In this Design Chit-Chat, we would like to present a series of member’s voices to give you as direct a picture as possible of the PayPay Design Team and its atmosphere of craftsmanship. This time, we would like to introduce Aerin Riangkruar from the design team.

What is your team and job description?

The design team is divided mainly into 3sections – The Core app teams, the Financial teams, and the O2O teams.

I’m currently working with the O2O team – our goal is to connect the merchant to the user. We’re working on helping the merchant understand their customer better while providing valuable deals to our customers. We have 3products under the O2O pipeline – Map Search, Coupons, and Stamp Card.

What made you decide to become a designer?

I remembered drawing on my house wall when I was 3years old and thought that I was Leonardo Da Vinci. I was born into a family of designers. My sister is an Architect while my brother is a product designer – it must be some calling deep in our DNA.

I discovered my love for digital design when I was 14. It was the first time I volunteered to create a school website. Back then, things weren’t as sophisticated as how it is now. I have to learn everything from scratch. It was fun trying to test what works and what doesn’t.

What projects have you worked on recently?

I’ve been working on the Stamp Card project for almost a year now. It was a great pleasure to work from the beginning of the project to the point of release. We finally launched the feature in March 2022. There were some unexpected problems which we solved together as a team.

We’re brainstorming and doing workshops regularly to iterate and improve the user experience, making it more enjoyable for the users.

The process of getting ideas

How I come up with design ideas is by looking at social media. Checking what is trending right now – what is popular, is there any pain point users are experiencing. Then making a quick draft design with those pain points in mind, take the draft design to discussion with the team to exchange ideas for improvement.

Our design team at PayPay is a small team of 16 happy people. We’re diverse in nationality and languages but what we have in common is our passion for design. Each of us is also unique – some good at design systems, some are good at illustration, and some are experts in user research.

We have a design review meeting weekly to discuss design solutions and exchange ideas. We also do a workshop to design together remotely.

What you value in creating products with PayPay

At PayPay, what we treasure dearly is our users. There are multiple approaches to good product development – such as speed, user tests, etc. But what is really at the core of everyone on the PayPay development team is we want to create a product that our users will love to use.

Our product development doesn’t end at the release. We’re constantly finding new ways to make the product even more enjoyable.

What you would like to challenge at PayPay in the future

In PayPay, we’re always working at light speed to deliver the best services to our users. We’re doing this by observing the quantitative data and feedback on SNS. However, I want to dive deep into user qualitative research like regular users interview or group discussions to discover, understand, and empathize with users.

We’re pushing for this movement in the PayPay UX Lab team – where we’re trying to implement a workflow that incorporates user interviews as a part of the development process. There are some challenges with making sure user personal information is kept secure and protected. Once the process is in place, I’m sure PayPay will be the most user-friendly product in Japan.

Message to those who are considering working at PayPay

If you’re a designer looking to work in Japan – why don’t you give PayPay a chance? We’re a team of happy people gathering from all over the world with one goal – to create the best payment product.

We respect diversity and appreciate each other as unique individuals. As long as you’re happy making things that matter – PayPay is for you.

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

Author: Aerin Riangkruar ／ Supervisor: YAGI ／ Editor: Hinako
*Employees’ affiliations are as of the time of the interview.