Ryan Donahue

"When Confinity had first spotted eBay users’ enthusiasm for its products, designer Ryan Donahue worked with David Sacks to improve the auction payment mechanism. An early incarnation consisted of two steps: First, the user would press the PayPal button; next, they’d enter the dollar value of the transaction and click Pay. It occurred to Donahue to simply fold the second step into the first: if users entered the dollar amount and pressed the button, the next page could pre-populate the total and confirm payment. The change seemed quaint, obvious, even trivial—but it shaved precious seconds from transactions. And in the view of David Sacks, every moment of friction was fat to be cut. Small, time-saving improvements, he believed, led to stickier products—and instant gratification won over impatient users. Those improvements to the payment design produced a corollary insight: What if buttons were the core product? What if these slices of pixels could help PayPal become the web’s default payment system? The team began to brainstorm a “whole suite of embeddable buttons that, if someone was on your website, they could click to pay you,” explained Sacks. Buttons? The idea sounded laughable, but its implications were significant. Strategically, a focus on buttons catapulted the company into a space with few rivals. Sure, copycats could marry money to email. They could lavish bonuses on would-be users. And they could fight for auction territory. But it would be a while before they obsessed over buttons."

"Designer Ryan Donahue remembered a team “obsessed with the distribution of their product. They had this very savvy and sort of really mature perspective on how important it was to be able to get your product into people’s hands—and that that actually trumps the quality of your product and many, many other things.”"

"When Confinity had first spotted eBay users’ enthusiasm for its products, designer Ryan Donahue worked with David Sacks to improve the auction payment mechanism. An early incarnation consisted of two steps: First, the user would press the PayPal button; next, they’d enter the dollar value of the transaction and click Pay. It occurred to Donahue to simply fold the second step into the first: if users entered the dollar amount and pressed the button, the next page could pre-populate the total and confirm payment. The change seemed quaint, obvious, even trivial—but it shaved precious seconds from transactions. And in the view of David Sacks, every moment of friction was fat to be cut. Small, time-saving improvements, he believed, led to stickier products—and instant gratification won over impatient users. Those improvements to the payment design produced a corollary insight: What if buttons were the core product? What if these slices of pixels could help PayPal become the web’s default payment system? The team began to brainstorm a “whole suite of embeddable buttons that, if someone was on your website, they could click to pay you,” explained Sacks. Buttons? The idea sounded laughable, but its implications were significant. Strategically, a focus on buttons catapulted the company into a space with few rivals. Sure, copycats could marry money to email. They could lavish bonuses on would-be users. And they could fight for auction territory. But it would be a while before they obsessed over buttons."

"Designer Ryan Donahue remembered a team “obsessed with the distribution of their product. They had this very savvy and sort of really mature perspective on how important it was to be able to get your product into people’s hands—and that that actually trumps the quality of your product and many, many other things.”"