7 ms·

Rebranding the Wise design system for everyone (part 1)

84 points by tagawa 4y ago

mdrzn 4y ago
Hate the green so much. It was lovely as blue.
azifali 4y ago
I have no opinion on the wise design redesign except the app is beginning to break ( can’t edit failed transfers, web app points to email and email points back to web app), non existent customer support with standard templates with execs in the UK time zone. I’d request the wise team to focus on the core product in addition to making necessary ui/ux enhancements. I use wise heavily and the recent experience has me looking for alternatives
Blixsz 4y ago
Quite ironic that the title of the blogpost, “Accessible but never boring”, is completely unreadable to me because of the horrible font.
unwind 4y ago
I've never used Wise (or hardly heard about it), but I think their use of textual currency names under the balance numbers was ... odd. I mean, even as a Northern European, I expect to see something like "£2163.00" for a balance in British Pounds, or (of course) "€4,718.16" for something in Euros. Obviously that would extend to "$4711.17" for something in US Dollars, too. I admire the clarity of spelling it out in full, at the same time as I'm uncomfortable about the missing symbol. Does that make sense? Of course for my native Sweden, which is not in the Euro zone, it would be even more interesting the the name of the currency is (shocker) in Swedish, and the symbol too. Translating monetary values is non-trivial, basically. I guess if the app is in Swedish, I would expect the "4.711,17 kr" formatting (yes, we use thousands period and decimal comma) but if it were in English that would be "SEK 4,711.17".
- gitmaeker 4y ago
  The thing is that many countries use the same symbol for their national currency (eg Australian, Canadian and Eastern Caribbean Dollars, just to name a few). Not all people are aware of what all currency symbols are (maybe except the popular $,€ and £, just look at your keyboard). What about ¥, ₤, ₩, ₫, etc.)?
blowski 4y ago
Company does rebrand. And right on cue, a bunch of comments saying it's rubbish and unnecessary. Honestly, can't we find anything more interesting to say? Within a few years, this design will be redesigned, and all the same hackneyed criticisms will be rolled out again. I like that their rebrand is focused on accessibility.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  > Honestly, can't we find anything more interesting to say? Can't Wise find anything more interesting to do? It's a boring change of paint coat, coupled with evangelical false prophet language that seriously reduces trust in a company that wants to handle your money.
  - blowski 4y ago
    If it’s not interesting for you, then don’t submit it, upvote it, or comment on it. You can even hide it. Some do find it interesting, and would rather not have to wade through this swamp to have a conversation about it.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      As a heavy user of Wise I can have my opinion on the user-facing side of their business. I trust them with my money and my trust is dependent on their conduct. They've been sending a dozen e-mails to me about this redesign, so apparently they think it is very important.
      - blowski 4y ago
        Absolutely. And as a heavy user of Hacker News, I can express opinions about how “interesting” the discussion is.
kossTKR 4y ago
Absolutely atrocious design, i honestly thought they had been hacked at first. Way to much whitespace, the bg texture all over the place only ads non sensical visual noise, the green base colour is off compared to the old more dull blue reflecting a "serious" business. This new retro 2001'ish texturing aesthetic is way too special for a money transferring service, including the "music poster font". And i like that dot-com aesthetic, but it can't just be pasted on-top of a modern layout. It needs to be compact and subdued by a tight grid. The old app looked clean and worked great, and was honestly one of the reasons i choose this service for several business. This design makes me want to leave and lots of people i know would think 'what??' if i recommended a page looking this for anything serious.
tomp 4y ago
Is it just me, or is this a fancy article with nice animations full of marketing speak, but doesn't actually mention the reason why they removed their previous blue brand/color?
noodlesUK 4y ago
I don’t understand why you would do a redesign (and in the past a rename) that takes all the visual distinctiveness of the brand and just chucks it in the bin. The whole thing feels like a ripoff of cash app’s vibe, the typography comes across as very unserious, and whilst I appreciate that colourblindness is a good thing to design against, that feels like an excuse to justify throwing the baby out with the bath water. I loved the old spinner for instance. Now it feels like a video game loading page. The conversation should go: “wow that’s amazing” “yeah it’s also way more accessible” Rather than: “That looks like shit” “The reason it looks like shit is accessibility” It gives accessible design a bad rep. Edit: I say this as a regular user of wise. I recommend it to other businesses I work with and it gave the impression of a serious professional brand. I wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable anymore because the branding is much more casual and feels like it’s aimed at consumers & lifestyle biz far more than businesses that want to pay an international invoice.
Vibgyor5 4y ago
I have been using Wise (formerly TransferWise - which is how I still refer to it) for close to 8-9 years at this point...and this UX/UI design is one of the most horrific and unpleasant one I have seen in years. It is not one of those "I got used to the design so much so this change annoys me" - it is one of those "works useful, iconic, and there was no point in ruining it." This behavior reminds me of "justifying" their job or gaining points in front of the Management by having useless but visible projects (something I have heard was a frequent problem at Google fwiw). Green color is great for enabling color-blind folks to navigate. Sure, but it did not require a completely cartoonish overhaul of the UI Design. Font is too big, website is a mess with whitespace, and currency calculator now require scrolling down. It is very difficult in terms of legibility.
rvz 4y ago
And un-wise design decision.
ravagat 4y ago
I use Wise strictly through the web interface and I'd say this redesign has become less utilitarian than the previous one. I yearn for the day, rebranding & redesigning into the hyped styles stops and a return to utility, especially for what is primarily a utility service/app/business is, is encouraged rather than keeping up with the joneses' hype. I use Wise weekly so I'm curious if anything breaks for me
nr912 4y ago
Redesign has broken destination currency selection for me when converting from one to another. No matter what currency is selected (from preexisting balances) it always defaults to the first in the list. On iOS only - it worked via website. I do wonder if the business is in good health longer term. Unusual to shift perception and target audience when things are going well. Some increased fees recently too, albeit expected given the economic climate. Doesn't fill me with trust personally.
Benjamin_Dobell 4y ago
Not a fan of the Wise rebranding. It immediately made me uncomfortable. After thinking about it some more, it is because the rebranding is "fun". I'm transferring significant amounts of money through this company. I don't want fun. I want someone I can trust, that's it. The TransferWise to Wise rebranding was seamless and didn't damage trust. I'm going to keep using Wise because they're the best option right now. However, starting up the app for the first time after the redesign was incredibly uncomfortable, and that feeling hasn't gone away.
- theonlybutlet 4y ago
  Funnily, in colour psychology, the colour blue signals trust.
- mohon 4y ago
  Me too, I'm wondering why they decided to switch immediately. Why not provide user with a toggle to switch between old and new UI, then they can see how the data says
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Why not provide user with a toggle to switch between old and new UI, then they can see how the data says That's because they probably don't want to. Even those who do "data-driven decisionmaking" usually tend to massage it to fit their narrative.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Incremental experimentation? Slow
  - flakeoil 4y ago
    That's worse and confusing for the end user in the long run. It's also difficult and costly to keep two development lines in parallel. And confusing when giving support. My bank still has an old and a new site (or at least design) and that's been going for 5 years. Insane.
- csomar 4y ago
jalapenos 4y ago
Yeah there was no reason to do this. It looked absolutely fine and trustworthy as it was before, and these resources could have been better spent addressing functional matters or adding product lines. That said, there was no need to rebrand as Wise either, as everyone still calls it "Wise (formerly known as TransferWise)" online, because "wise" is too generic a word to be a good enough selector. I'll keep using you, because you have a good engineering department and you're the only game in town, but things like this are a tell that the business is starting to drift away from core priorities. This reminds me of the similarly poor branding change done by Toggl, where they changed from a nice, visually comfortable theme, to a conjunctivitis themed one. These behaviours are what I call "do-stuff-itis", which can indicate too much staff in certain areas of the business or overall, or weakness in the executive team.
- woile 4y ago
  Couldn't be that the UX/design team is doing it's job?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    More like justifying its job by creating unnecessary busywork. Accessibility concerns can be addressed without reworking the entire design and adding even more whitespace and stupid fonts/graphics.
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  Anyone remember the rebrand of uber where whatshisname made all the decisions and turned out to be absolutely hilarious?
- OJFord 4y ago
  > Yeah there was no reason to do this. How about making the site more usable to the 1 in 12 men^ with the most common form of colour blindness? (Never mind the fewer women, and the less common types.) ^https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/colour-vision-deficiency/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/colour-vision-deficiency/
  - 4y ago
anileated 4y ago
Nice write-up on the basics of color and accessibility. If you are like me and get lost in the seemingly unlimited choice of colors and palette options when designing GUIs, the sanest way to go about it is to 1) test for accessibility (WCAG, etc.) and 2) pick something that looks good (if you operate within the constraints of the first, you will find the range of the second narrow substantially). PS. As a Wise user I can say I was cautious coming to Wise for the first time post-redesign but I found it just as easy to work with, the GUI mostly gets out of the way like before. From designer’s standpoint I think getting rid of dark contrast blue areas helps visual hierarchy and overall the tones are not distracting but aesthetically pleasing.
deleted 4y ago
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gumby 4y ago
That's cool and all, but my card expired and while trying to replace it (I have to re-send some bank info for some reason) at some point a progress button ("next") would become unresponsive in whatever browser I tried...so now I can't use Wise any more. But if I could I guess it would be easy to read and look cool!
shrumm 4y ago
I noticed an immediate loss of functionality via this redesign. The previous home page let me calculate quickly how much it would cost to do a transfer - arguably the PRIMARY value of the service. now it’s replaced with two CTA buttons to sign up etc.
- ColonelBlimp 4y ago
  The calculator is still in the new home page. You just need to scroll down a bit. Perhaps it was at the top of the home page before. I don't remember.
  - shrumm 4y ago
    you're right, its a few scrolls down. It used to be right at the top, so it became a learned behaviour for me to go their site and quickly check the cost of a transfer versus what my bank offers me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
I like the new look. I’ve been a huge wise user, it was the cornerstone of my finances when living abroad for a few years. I cannot imagine how much harder it would have been trying to survive on the other viable alternative at the time, HSBC or western union. Using your own banks debit card abroad for an extended amount of time is a recipe for having your accounts closed due to lack of domicile. Nowadays, I tend to use it as my ATM card when traveling abroad since you can do the currency conversion before the transaction and be a little more certain you’re not taking out too much. The fine grained transaction limits for a large variety of card uses in the app is best in class too
000ooo000 4y ago
>Our goal was to create a colour system that isn’t just inspired by the world, but opens it up too. Who exactly is the target audience of crap like this? Are there really folk out there who are genuinely wowed by this rhetoric?
- vultour 4y ago
  Sounds like something you tell your boss to sell the idea.
- AdamN 4y ago
  Developers and designers - I don't think customers are the target audience.
- culi 4y ago
  It's not about wowing anyone it's about making their app usable to the 300 million colorblind people out there
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    You've been posting this in multiple places. Fail to see why addressing color blindness has to be bland and confusion
    - culi 4y ago
      "Opening the world up" is them signalling that the rebrand is focused on accessibility and I feel like this point was lost on GP. That's all I'm addressing If you wanna critique the design itself, I have nothing to say about that. But, fwiw, you're the only one I've seen in this thread criticize that the new design is "bland" but you're entitled to that opinion. What decisions would you wish they'd made differently to make the new design less bland and confusing?
graypegg 4y ago
I find these sorts of shallow design specs irksome. There’s so much fluff to make this seem more thought out and systematized than it was. Prime example, a few screenshots down you see a form layout for some “myself” profile. They’ve gone in and pointed to random colours with “WCAG AAA/AA” and the contrast ratio. Great. But the toggle button it shows is pretty ambiguous considering the light grey on white background they’re using. Is the form accessible just because the colours are contrasty enough? No one reads the WCAG spec but everyone loves to cite the tables of acceptable minimums from it! I’ve seen some design systems that people actually make use of, and they’re never as verbose as this kinds are.
- masswerk 4y ago
  Especially, provided that this actually a good old tab interface. Not that there had been a time when we knew how to make tabs unambiguous that anyone could still remember, but… Ok, on closer inspection, is this rather a horizontally laid out select (or radio group)? Does the content below change with options? Is there anything, so we could tell, whether it's tabs or a select and what the consequences are of choosing either option? Is the vertical white space a functional divider/separator or just flat UI design? I guess, the transaction business is just a leap of faith…
openpaycard 4y ago
[flagged]
darkfloor 4y ago
I subscribe to their 'Wise Rate Alerts' by email. The old message design was quickly readable with exchange rates side by side. The new one needs me to scroll down and to take time and think about what I'm looking at.
allanrbo 4y ago
The "flatness" in many designs these days really bother me. My 85 year old dad has completely given up on using technology. He has always struggled with it, but at least in the Windows 95 / Windows 2000 days, things were pretty consistent: an embossed button, that looked like a physical button, was clickable. A scroll bar meant that there was more. Icons usually had significantly different colors from each other and so were easily distinguishable. Now days, how am I to explain to him what can be clicked, and where you can drag to scroll? Every app has their own "visual design language", and all try to aim to be as flat, colorless, and minimal as possible. You have to know "secret codes" like where to swipe, to do actions. It's tough for folks who don't live and breathe software every day all day.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Most apps are designed for power users, since that's the cohort that drives revenue and LTV
  - allanrbo 4y ago
    As a power user, I much prefer denser and more information rich UIs. Just tried Windows 11 for the first time today. The file browser's "detail" mode (which I'd consider the power user mode) has been destroyed by making it multi-line and adding a ton of padding, so now I can only see half has many files on a screen as before...
  - avh02 4y ago
    I disagree, most apps are designed for the lowest common denominator, though they do a poor job of that. Power users want settings and customizability to make their flows better, but those are not "beautiful" or are "distractions". See: the decline of evernote.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Until the early 2000s, consistency between applications used to be a top priority in UI design. There were decades of serious usability research underpinning the Windows and Mac interfaces, and the APIs were finally getting to the point where you could spin up a standard UI with useful controls and trust that it follows platform guidelines, inherits accessibility features, etc. Then came the double punch of web and mobile. All the hard-won lessons of desktop consistency were thrown out of the window. Many UI designers used to have a background in psychology and cognitive science; they were replaced by graphic design graduates whose primary concern was picking custom fonts and drawing pop-up menu buttons that look nothing like the OS standard component. A lot of managers got “design thinking” religion and drew exactly the wrong lessons. They started believing design leadership is a fourth-grade Steve Jobs imitation: wear a turtleneck, bark opinions in meetings, and make sure their product UI is a completely custom thing with lots of blank space, no useful information density, and controls that look like plain text. There’s no going back. Apple could have made a difference by enforcing iOS UI guidelines more strongly in the early days of the platform, but that opportunity was lost. The web remains beyond hope as even the most basic UI components are constantly reinvented by graphic designers wielding Figma because the browser is a useless UI platform.
kmarc 4y ago
Oh, so now it looks like... Revolut? I abandoned (Transfer)wise a long time ago for reasons, but i always liked their Web app, compared to the mobile only Instagram-Story like nonsense Revolut turned into. Now looking at wise's mockups I see that the problem is clearly in me, and their focus group is indeed the TikTok generation. Fun fact about my tiny (possibly bankrupt) former bank 10y ago: they didn't have an IBAN and thus weren't able to transfer money internationally. In their landing page they promoted Transfer Wise as a "reliable and cool" solution with which I can do my international transfer. Well well, little did they know that they were suggesting that I use their 1) disruptor 2) now direct competitor.
expertentipp 4y ago
This is so unexciting. But hey, nowadays anyone can start doing UX and design. If you refuse to implement you're not a team player.
hknmtt 4y ago
wise now looks like revolut on the phone. literal clone with all those annoying "popups" and calls to action.

84 points by tagawa 4y ago

Hate the green so much. It was lovely as blue.

I have no opinion on the wise design redesign except the app is beginning to break ( can’t edit failed transfers, web app points to email and email points back to web app), non existent customer support with standard templates with execs in the UK time zone. I’d request the wise team to focus on the core product in addition to making necessary ui/ux enhancements. I use wise heavily and the recent experience has me looking for alternatives

Blixsz 4y ago

Quite ironic that the title of the blogpost, “Accessible but never boring”, is completely unreadable to me because of the horrible font.

unwind 4y ago

I've never used Wise (or hardly heard about it), but I think their use of textual currency names under the balance numbers was ... odd. I mean, even as a Northern European, I expect to see something like "£2163.00" for a balance in British Pounds, or (of course) "€4,718.16" for something in Euros. Obviously that would extend to "$4711.17" for something in US Dollars, too. I admire the clarity of spelling it out in full, at the same time as I'm uncomfortable about the missing symbol. Does that make sense? Of course for my native Sweden, which is not in the Euro zone, it would be even more interesting the the name of the currency is (shocker) in Swedish, and the symbol too. Translating monetary values is non-trivial, basically. I guess if the app is in Swedish, I would expect the "4.711,17 kr" formatting (yes, we use thousands period and decimal comma) but if it were in English that would be "SEK 4,711.17".

gitmaeker 4y ago
The thing is that many countries use the same symbol for their national currency (eg Australian, Canadian and Eastern Caribbean Dollars, just to name a few). Not all people are aware of what all currency symbols are (maybe except the popular $,€ and £, just look at your keyboard). What about ¥, ₤, ₩, ₫, etc.)?

blowski 4y ago

Company does rebrand. And right on cue, a bunch of comments saying it's rubbish and unnecessary. Honestly, can't we find anything more interesting to say? Within a few years, this design will be redesigned, and all the same hackneyed criticisms will be rolled out again. I like that their rebrand is focused on accessibility.

carlosjobim 4y ago
> Honestly, can't we find anything more interesting to say? Can't Wise find anything more interesting to do? It's a boring change of paint coat, coupled with evangelical false prophet language that seriously reduces trust in a company that wants to handle your money.
- blowski 4y ago
  If it’s not interesting for you, then don’t submit it, upvote it, or comment on it. You can even hide it. Some do find it interesting, and would rather not have to wade through this swamp to have a conversation about it.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    As a heavy user of Wise I can have my opinion on the user-facing side of their business. I trust them with my money and my trust is dependent on their conduct. They've been sending a dozen e-mails to me about this redesign, so apparently they think it is very important.
    - blowski 4y ago
      Absolutely. And as a heavy user of Hacker News, I can express opinions about how “interesting” the discussion is.

kossTKR 4y ago

Absolutely atrocious design, i honestly thought they had been hacked at first. Way to much whitespace, the bg texture all over the place only ads non sensical visual noise, the green base colour is off compared to the old more dull blue reflecting a "serious" business. This new retro 2001'ish texturing aesthetic is way too special for a money transferring service, including the "music poster font". And i like that dot-com aesthetic, but it can't just be pasted on-top of a modern layout. It needs to be compact and subdued by a tight grid. The old app looked clean and worked great, and was honestly one of the reasons i choose this service for several business. This design makes me want to leave and lots of people i know would think 'what??' if i recommended a page looking this for anything serious.

tomp 4y ago

Is it just me, or is this a fancy article with nice animations full of marketing speak, but doesn't actually mention the reason why they removed their previous blue brand/color?

noodlesUK 4y ago

I don’t understand why you would do a redesign (and in the past a rename) that takes all the visual distinctiveness of the brand and just chucks it in the bin. The whole thing feels like a ripoff of cash app’s vibe, the typography comes across as very unserious, and whilst I appreciate that colourblindness is a good thing to design against, that feels like an excuse to justify throwing the baby out with the bath water. I loved the old spinner for instance. Now it feels like a video game loading page. The conversation should go: “wow that’s amazing” “yeah it’s also way more accessible” Rather than: “That looks like shit” “The reason it looks like shit is accessibility” It gives accessible design a bad rep. Edit: I say this as a regular user of wise. I recommend it to other businesses I work with and it gave the impression of a serious professional brand. I wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable anymore because the branding is much more casual and feels like it’s aimed at consumers & lifestyle biz far more than businesses that want to pay an international invoice.

Vibgyor5 4y ago

I have been using Wise (formerly TransferWise - which is how I still refer to it) for close to 8-9 years at this point...and this UX/UI design is one of the most horrific and unpleasant one I have seen in years. It is not one of those "I got used to the design so much so this change annoys me" - it is one of those "works useful, iconic, and there was no point in ruining it." This behavior reminds me of "justifying" their job or gaining points in front of the Management by having useless but visible projects (something I have heard was a frequent problem at Google fwiw). Green color is great for enabling color-blind folks to navigate. Sure, but it did not require a completely cartoonish overhaul of the UI Design. Font is too big, website is a mess with whitespace, and currency calculator now require scrolling down. It is very difficult in terms of legibility.

rvz 4y ago

And un-wise design decision.

ravagat 4y ago

I use Wise strictly through the web interface and I'd say this redesign has become less utilitarian than the previous one. I yearn for the day, rebranding & redesigning into the hyped styles stops and a return to utility, especially for what is primarily a utility service/app/business is, is encouraged rather than keeping up with the joneses' hype. I use Wise weekly so I'm curious if anything breaks for me

nr912 4y ago

Redesign has broken destination currency selection for me when converting from one to another. No matter what currency is selected (from preexisting balances) it always defaults to the first in the list. On iOS only - it worked via website. I do wonder if the business is in good health longer term. Unusual to shift perception and target audience when things are going well. Some increased fees recently too, albeit expected given the economic climate. Doesn't fill me with trust personally.

Benjamin_Dobell 4y ago

Not a fan of the Wise rebranding. It immediately made me uncomfortable. After thinking about it some more, it is because the rebranding is "fun". I'm transferring significant amounts of money through this company. I don't want fun. I want someone I can trust, that's it. The TransferWise to Wise rebranding was seamless and didn't damage trust. I'm going to keep using Wise because they're the best option right now. However, starting up the app for the first time after the redesign was incredibly uncomfortable, and that feeling hasn't gone away.

theonlybutlet 4y ago
Funnily, in colour psychology, the colour blue signals trust.
mohon 4y ago
Me too, I'm wondering why they decided to switch immediately. Why not provide user with a toggle to switch between old and new UI, then they can see how the data says
- userbinator 4y ago
  Why not provide user with a toggle to switch between old and new UI, then they can see how the data says That's because they probably don't want to. Even those who do "data-driven decisionmaking" usually tend to massage it to fit their narrative.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Incremental experimentation? Slow
- flakeoil 4y ago
  That's worse and confusing for the end user in the long run. It's also difficult and costly to keep two development lines in parallel. And confusing when giving support. My bank still has an old and a new site (or at least design) and that's been going for 5 years. Insane.
csomar 4y ago

jalapenos 4y ago

Yeah there was no reason to do this. It looked absolutely fine and trustworthy as it was before, and these resources could have been better spent addressing functional matters or adding product lines. That said, there was no need to rebrand as Wise either, as everyone still calls it "Wise (formerly known as TransferWise)" online, because "wise" is too generic a word to be a good enough selector. I'll keep using you, because you have a good engineering department and you're the only game in town, but things like this are a tell that the business is starting to drift away from core priorities. This reminds me of the similarly poor branding change done by Toggl, where they changed from a nice, visually comfortable theme, to a conjunctivitis themed one. These behaviours are what I call "do-stuff-itis", which can indicate too much staff in certain areas of the business or overall, or weakness in the executive team.

woile 4y ago
Couldn't be that the UX/design team is doing it's job?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  More like justifying its job by creating unnecessary busywork. Accessibility concerns can be addressed without reworking the entire design and adding even more whitespace and stupid fonts/graphics.
jnsaff2 4y ago
Anyone remember the rebrand of uber where whatshisname made all the decisions and turned out to be absolutely hilarious?
OJFord 4y ago
> Yeah there was no reason to do this. How about making the site more usable to the 1 in 12 men^ with the most common form of colour blindness? (Never mind the fewer women, and the less common types.) ^https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/colour-vision-deficiency/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/colour-vision-deficiency/
- 4y ago

anileated 4y ago

Nice write-up on the basics of color and accessibility. If you are like me and get lost in the seemingly unlimited choice of colors and palette options when designing GUIs, the sanest way to go about it is to 1) test for accessibility (WCAG, etc.) and 2) pick something that looks good (if you operate within the constraints of the first, you will find the range of the second narrow substantially). PS. As a Wise user I can say I was cautious coming to Wise for the first time post-redesign but I found it just as easy to work with, the GUI mostly gets out of the way like before. From designer’s standpoint I think getting rid of dark contrast blue areas helps visual hierarchy and overall the tones are not distracting but aesthetically pleasing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gumby 4y ago

That's cool and all, but my card expired and while trying to replace it (I have to re-send some bank info for some reason) at some point a progress button ("next") would become unresponsive in whatever browser I tried...so now I can't use Wise any more. But if I could I guess it would be easy to read and look cool!

shrumm 4y ago

I noticed an immediate loss of functionality via this redesign. The previous home page let me calculate quickly how much it would cost to do a transfer - arguably the PRIMARY value of the service. now it’s replaced with two CTA buttons to sign up etc.

ColonelBlimp 4y ago
The calculator is still in the new home page. You just need to scroll down a bit. Perhaps it was at the top of the home page before. I don't remember.
- shrumm 4y ago
  you're right, its a few scrolls down. It used to be right at the top, so it became a learned behaviour for me to go their site and quickly check the cost of a transfer versus what my bank offers me.
deleted 4y ago
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kylehotchkiss 4y ago

I like the new look. I’ve been a huge wise user, it was the cornerstone of my finances when living abroad for a few years. I cannot imagine how much harder it would have been trying to survive on the other viable alternative at the time, HSBC or western union. Using your own banks debit card abroad for an extended amount of time is a recipe for having your accounts closed due to lack of domicile. Nowadays, I tend to use it as my ATM card when traveling abroad since you can do the currency conversion before the transaction and be a little more certain you’re not taking out too much. The fine grained transaction limits for a large variety of card uses in the app is best in class too

000ooo000 4y ago

>Our goal was to create a colour system that isn’t just inspired by the world, but opens it up too. Who exactly is the target audience of crap like this? Are there really folk out there who are genuinely wowed by this rhetoric?

vultour 4y ago
Sounds like something you tell your boss to sell the idea.
AdamN 4y ago
Developers and designers - I don't think customers are the target audience.
culi 4y ago
It's not about wowing anyone it's about making their app usable to the 300 million colorblind people out there
- hackernewds 4y ago
  You've been posting this in multiple places. Fail to see why addressing color blindness has to be bland and confusion
  - culi 4y ago
    "Opening the world up" is them signalling that the rebrand is focused on accessibility and I feel like this point was lost on GP. That's all I'm addressing If you wanna critique the design itself, I have nothing to say about that. But, fwiw, you're the only one I've seen in this thread criticize that the new design is "bland" but you're entitled to that opinion. What decisions would you wish they'd made differently to make the new design less bland and confusing?

graypegg 4y ago

I find these sorts of shallow design specs irksome. There’s so much fluff to make this seem more thought out and systematized than it was. Prime example, a few screenshots down you see a form layout for some “myself” profile. They’ve gone in and pointed to random colours with “WCAG AAA/AA” and the contrast ratio. Great. But the toggle button it shows is pretty ambiguous considering the light grey on white background they’re using. Is the form accessible just because the colours are contrasty enough? No one reads the WCAG spec but everyone loves to cite the tables of acceptable minimums from it! I’ve seen some design systems that people actually make use of, and they’re never as verbose as this kinds are.

masswerk 4y ago
Especially, provided that this actually a good old tab interface. Not that there had been a time when we knew how to make tabs unambiguous that anyone could still remember, but… Ok, on closer inspection, is this rather a horizontally laid out select (or radio group)? Does the content below change with options? Is there anything, so we could tell, whether it's tabs or a select and what the consequences are of choosing either option? Is the vertical white space a functional divider/separator or just flat UI design? I guess, the transaction business is just a leap of faith…

openpaycard 4y ago

[flagged]

darkfloor 4y ago

I subscribe to their 'Wise Rate Alerts' by email. The old message design was quickly readable with exchange rates side by side. The new one needs me to scroll down and to take time and think about what I'm looking at.

allanrbo 4y ago

The "flatness" in many designs these days really bother me. My 85 year old dad has completely given up on using technology. He has always struggled with it, but at least in the Windows 95 / Windows 2000 days, things were pretty consistent: an embossed button, that looked like a physical button, was clickable. A scroll bar meant that there was more. Icons usually had significantly different colors from each other and so were easily distinguishable. Now days, how am I to explain to him what can be clicked, and where you can drag to scroll? Every app has their own "visual design language", and all try to aim to be as flat, colorless, and minimal as possible. You have to know "secret codes" like where to swipe, to do actions. It's tough for folks who don't live and breathe software every day all day.

hackernewds 4y ago
Most apps are designed for power users, since that's the cohort that drives revenue and LTV
- allanrbo 4y ago
  As a power user, I much prefer denser and more information rich UIs. Just tried Windows 11 for the first time today. The file browser's "detail" mode (which I'd consider the power user mode) has been destroyed by making it multi-line and adding a ton of padding, so now I can only see half has many files on a screen as before...
- avh02 4y ago
  I disagree, most apps are designed for the lowest common denominator, though they do a poor job of that. Power users want settings and customizability to make their flows better, but those are not "beautiful" or are "distractions". See: the decline of evernote.
pavlov 4y ago
Until the early 2000s, consistency between applications used to be a top priority in UI design. There were decades of serious usability research underpinning the Windows and Mac interfaces, and the APIs were finally getting to the point where you could spin up a standard UI with useful controls and trust that it follows platform guidelines, inherits accessibility features, etc. Then came the double punch of web and mobile. All the hard-won lessons of desktop consistency were thrown out of the window. Many UI designers used to have a background in psychology and cognitive science; they were replaced by graphic design graduates whose primary concern was picking custom fonts and drawing pop-up menu buttons that look nothing like the OS standard component. A lot of managers got “design thinking” religion and drew exactly the wrong lessons. They started believing design leadership is a fourth-grade Steve Jobs imitation: wear a turtleneck, bark opinions in meetings, and make sure their product UI is a completely custom thing with lots of blank space, no useful information density, and controls that look like plain text. There’s no going back. Apple could have made a difference by enforcing iOS UI guidelines more strongly in the early days of the platform, but that opportunity was lost. The web remains beyond hope as even the most basic UI components are constantly reinvented by graphic designers wielding Figma because the browser is a useless UI platform.

kmarc 4y ago

Oh, so now it looks like... Revolut? I abandoned (Transfer)wise a long time ago for reasons, but i always liked their Web app, compared to the mobile only Instagram-Story like nonsense Revolut turned into. Now looking at wise's mockups I see that the problem is clearly in me, and their focus group is indeed the TikTok generation. Fun fact about my tiny (possibly bankrupt) former bank 10y ago: they didn't have an IBAN and thus weren't able to transfer money internationally. In their landing page they promoted Transfer Wise as a "reliable and cool" solution with which I can do my international transfer. Well well, little did they know that they were suggesting that I use their 1) disruptor 2) now direct competitor.

expertentipp 4y ago

This is so unexciting. But hey, nowadays anyone can start doing UX and design. If you refuse to implement you're not a team player.

hknmtt 4y ago

wise now looks like revolut on the phone. literal clone with all those annoying "popups" and calls to action.