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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 fun

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/
- ChemSpider 4y ago
  But fixing this certainly would not require a complete and total redesign, or?
  - OJFord 4y ago
    No it wouldn't, but it is what the article's about. Maybe the link was changed, but I'm only aware of the 'complete and total redesign' from comments here - I've used Wise occasionally but not since it was called TransferWise I don't think, so I wouldn't have known it was so recent.
- tomp 4y ago
  Isn't color blindness mixing up red & green? So why would a green design be better than a blue design? Naively, it's strictly worse.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    You're right, that is naïve. 'Mixing up red & green' is one type (or a trait of some types), not the only one, and it doesn't mean say 'RGB' spans only two colours - it means some shades of red appear green and vice versa. It can also depend on context (red laser pointer invisible over a sea of green, say) and knowledge of the difference (presenter says something about their red laser pointer). There's no problem with using green, it's requiring it to contrast with red that's potentially problematic. For that reason it's probably a good general theme/background colour, even if that was the sole reason they were choosing one, because you'd be unlikely to want a contrasting red text colour over green background anyway.
    - tomp 4y ago
      Still doesn't explain why green would be better than blue. Don't all problems go away if you're just using blue?
      - lentil_soup 4y ago
ilikerashers 4y ago
All these fintechs are trying to move into each other's areas. We're not money transfer, we're a bank! Oh, and we do crypto. Does anyone want to buy shares? Mortgages anyone? Let's sell our technology back to the banks! They're all blending into each other and I guess the only way to differentiate in "Fintech 23" is pretty colours.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
They have so much regulatory work to do for any features involving finance that making tangible progress on the current product from where they are seems exponentially harder. They can barely get borderless expanded from the current countries offered. Other countries do not want to make it easy for their citizens to send money out.
MarkMc 4y ago
The rebrand to Wise was reasonable since they were branching out to general banking and didn’t want to be seen as just a way to send money.
culi 4y ago
They're a company focused on international money transfers... Did you even read the > In lots of countries, you have to get at least an AA rating by law. part? Or what about this part > there are approximately 300 million people with colour blindness worldwide
- echelon 4y ago
  I saw the update to the web app last night. Didn't touch the mobile app much, but the web app had an extreme makeover. The old web app was spartan and utilitarian. The new design looks faddish, CashApp-style - creepy bling icons floating in space everywhere. They've removed familiar and useful UI and replaced it with 1000x1000 spunky skeuomorphic splash icons that blink in and out of existence with every user action. Want to talk about accessibility? All the new javascript added to run the animations probably breaks a bunch of browsers. It slowed me down.
  - culi 4y ago
    The post I was replying to made zero comments on the accessibility and simply offered that there was "no reason to do this" and a waste of company resources I was replying to the fact there obviously are reasons to do this. Whether or not they did it well is another matter and I don't use Wise so I have nothing to add to that. I generally agree that modern web technologies are in an increasingly sorry state, but once again this has nothing to do with the design itself (the subject of the article and the subject being criticized) but rather the tech stack/implementation Though I do think the colors are pretty

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/

ChemSpider 4y ago
But fixing this certainly would not require a complete and total redesign, or?
- OJFord 4y ago
  No it wouldn't, but it is what the article's about. Maybe the link was changed, but I'm only aware of the 'complete and total redesign' from comments here - I've used Wise occasionally but not since it was called TransferWise I don't think, so I wouldn't have known it was so recent.
tomp 4y ago
Isn't color blindness mixing up red & green? So why would a green design be better than a blue design? Naively, it's strictly worse.
- OJFord 4y ago
  You're right, that is naïve. 'Mixing up red & green' is one type (or a trait of some types), not the only one, and it doesn't mean say 'RGB' spans only two colours - it means some shades of red appear green and vice versa. It can also depend on context (red laser pointer invisible over a sea of green, say) and knowledge of the difference (presenter says something about their red laser pointer). There's no problem with using green, it's requiring it to contrast with red that's potentially problematic. For that reason it's probably a good general theme/background colour, even if that was the sole reason they were choosing one, because you'd be unlikely to want a contrasting red text colour over green background anyway.
  - tomp 4y ago
    Still doesn't explain why green would be better than blue. Don't all problems go away if you're just using blue?
    - lentil_soup 4y ago

ilikerashers 4y ago

All these fintechs are trying to move into each other's areas. We're not money transfer, we're a bank! Oh, and we do crypto. Does anyone want to buy shares? Mortgages anyone? Let's sell our technology back to the banks! They're all blending into each other and I guess the only way to differentiate in "Fintech 23" is pretty colours.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

They have so much regulatory work to do for any features involving finance that making tangible progress on the current product from where they are seems exponentially harder. They can barely get borderless expanded from the current countries offered. Other countries do not want to make it easy for their citizens to send money out.

MarkMc 4y ago

The rebrand to Wise was reasonable since they were branching out to general banking and didn’t want to be seen as just a way to send money.

culi 4y ago

They're a company focused on international money transfers... Did you even read the > In lots of countries, you have to get at least an AA rating by law. part? Or what about this part > there are approximately 300 million people with colour blindness worldwide

echelon 4y ago
I saw the update to the web app last night. Didn't touch the mobile app much, but the web app had an extreme makeover. The old web app was spartan and utilitarian. The new design looks faddish, CashApp-style - creepy bling icons floating in space everywhere. They've removed familiar and useful UI and replaced it with 1000x1000 spunky skeuomorphic splash icons that blink in and out of existence with every user action. Want to talk about accessibility? All the new javascript added to run the animations probably breaks a bunch of browsers. It slowed me down.
- culi 4y ago
  The post I was replying to made zero comments on the accessibility and simply offered that there was "no reason to do this" and a waste of company resources I was replying to the fact there obviously are reasons to do this. Whether or not they did it well is another matter and I don't use Wise so I have nothing to add to that. I generally agree that modern web technologies are in an increasingly sorry state, but once again this has nothing to do with the design itself (the subject of the article and the subject being criticized) but rather the tech stack/implementation Though I do think the colors are pretty