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PayPal.com Gets a Makeover [UI]
- rurounijones 14y ago"When it came to updating our website, we brought in an expert: You." As soon as I read that I closed the tab. I thought it was pretty much agreed by now that relying on the "wisdom of the crowd" is useless when it comes to things that require specialised skills like design. Honestly, I wouldn't trust me to design a nice UI, why on earth would paypal.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoI think they're lying; the logo's not bigger.
- mtgx 14y agoI think they should use that mantra for their customer service division, rather than the UI design one.
- tmcw 14y agoWindows 7 Was My Idea! http://gizmodo.com/5477384/windows-7-was-my-idea-but-to-be-fair-i-dont-know-what-im-talking-about http://gizmodo.com/5477384/windows-7-was-my-idea-but-to-be-f...
- TheKidCoder 14y agoGreat, they redesigned the side of that site that is useless to an actual user of PayPal.
- whichdan 14y agoSadly, this is the truth.
- veb 14y agoIt's a lot of work to redesign a website, especially one with lots of weird pages. Makes me wonder of how much of an undertaking that would be... perhaps it would be easier to rebrand, build the same thing in a better way, with their API.
- fredoliveira 14y agoThey've had several years to do it already. It is a big undertaking, yes, but it's not like they don't have the resources.
- Zaheer 14y agoThe redesign is only skin deep. As soon as you log in you're back to the old UI.
- DigitalSea 14y agoConsidering the amount of work that would have gone into redesigning the exterior, I couldn't fathom how much work would be involved in redesigning the logged in interior part, it's not easy to just redesign an entire web application and when you're a site like Paypal the logged in view UI probably doesn't matter so much because you've already succeeded in converting a visitor into a Paypal account holder. When you're a site as big as Paypal, you've got to approach changes like this very carefully. Having said that, it's good to see design updates being made the old design screamed 2001 and needed drastic work.
- treelovinhippie 14y agoI like that photo of the lake. The tagline should be "Want to access your money? Start swimming!"
- mrchess 14y ago"PayPal.com gets a new landing page" is more like it.
- georgechen 14y agoThe new design language speaks "banking" to me. At one point I was mistaken the site for the American Express site which shares very similar color palette. The design also "feel" very Square (payment system) like to me. I am surprised this rebranding effort hasn't touch the brand mark logo yet...
- mediocregopher 14y agoThat grey text-shadow on top of the lake picture looks horrible, especially at my resolution since some of the text overlaps the mountains which makes the shadow stick out like a sore thumb. Other then that, looks like your standard bootstrap clone.
- chris_wot 14y agoBe sure to tell those folk who have had their payments refunded and violins destroyed. They'll love skin deep changes!
- sgdesign 14y agoI know bashing PayPal is cliché by now, but its UI is seriously one of the worst I've seen for an internet service. Everything loads extremely slowly, and every action is buried inside multiple layers of navigation, which only compounds the problem. What's more, you often cannot choose how many items to display per page or even search by keyword. This ensures that you have to click through page by page, enduring the slowness each time. They're obviously aware of these problems, but the fact that they haven't fixed them in years would indicate that either their codebase or their organization (or both) is very inflexible. Forget about destroying violins, for me this inability to adapt and improve their product is PayPal's main problem.
- FixThisPOS 14y agoPayPal is indeed pathetic, not only from a UI standpoint, but from a common-sense and security standpoint: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-use-e-mail-address-as.html http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-use...
- GvS 14y agoI like new design. It's much better than previous one. It was slow and when I clicked on "Log in" it opened new window. This one feels much faster and I can finally log in from main page.
- studiofellow 14y agoMost of the PayPal bashing I see is due to their strange policies with merchants. Horror stories of frozen accounts, forced refunds, etc. That's the main reason I don't use them. But yes, the terrible UI doesn't help either.
- fleitz 14y agoSame old beast, new threads. Once you get past the first page it's ugly as ever. I think we'll see man land on the moon again before that thing gets updated.
- yaix 14y agoFixing stuff that isn't broken. One critizism. Some years ago, G started putting these little downward arrow heads at the right side of words, meaning "click the link to open a menu". That was great. It put the user in control (again) of UI elements. Before, there was only "hovering opens menu", and that is terrible. While moving the pointer accross the screen, all kinds on UI elements jump open and vanish again. Its confusing, most of the time its anoying. And Paypal? The put the arrow heads at the right of the menu words, but don't respect the click convention. The menus ficker open and close again when you move the pointer away from the menu word. That is not how the it should be.
- corin_ 14y ago> Fixing stuff that isn't broken. I haven't looked at this new UI much, but I always found the old one to be pretty horrible, finding the right place for various tasks/settings was a pain in the ass. So while I don't know if this update does "fix" it, I certainly disagree that it wasn't broken.
- marknutter 14y agoI'm getting a little used to everyone on HN bashing every redesign they see (I'm exaggerating, of course) but I have to say I really like this new Paypal design. So much, in fact, that it really saddened me when I found out that it didn't translate over to the app itself once I logged in.
- conradfr 14y agoI like it. It's not really "energetic" but the color scheme is pleasant, and look at the old page ... Now the "you" part is unnecessary and quite demagogic.
- trg2 14y agoHi. I work at PayPal. Really good feedback from everyone, so thanks for that. This redesign has been a long time coming, and the team that launched it are some of the most brilliant I've ever been lucky enough to work with. As for the internal UI, that's changing soon too. If you're interested in checking out the beta, activate in-store checkout with your PayPal account at paypal.com/anywhere and you'll see the new account design. Still have work to do but it's getting much better. I'm an employee so I have a bias, but I'm also a customer that's been bitching about the UI for the last 8 years as well. I'm really happy with the direction the site (and the company) is headed.
- meric 14y agoI like this that what Paypal had before, but I see one issue (on Mac Safari): On the https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/make-online-payments https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/make-online-payments page, There is a drop down menu to select currency. Let's say I want to select TWD (New Taiwan Dollar), it's "below the fold" so I've got to scroll down. I do this using the scroll wheel, which I use almost all the time. So I see it's near the bottom of the list (because TWD starts with a T which is likely to be at the bottom of an alphabetically sorted list) and do a quick flick downwards. However rather than going to the bottom of the list, the list suddenly disappears and I'm no longer able to select my currency! Unless I can scroll almost exactly the amount I need to, either the TWD option is not visible on the list or the list closes. Even if I scroll slowly there is still a large chance I have to try a couple of times before I'm able to select TWD. It looks like when you scroll past the bottom, an instruction to close the list is triggered, and then the window containing the page scrolls down. I think that's the problem which can be fixed by preventing the drop down passing focus back to the window.
- cynusx 14y agoI am glad paypal is taking steps to address their UX problems, it should be a major priority if they ever want to reach regular uneducated folks.
- robmcm 14y agoNice try phisher! (seriously though, something like this is bold from a company that has been trying to educate users to be wary of sites pretending to be PayPal!)
- Ygg2 14y agoNice to see someone from PayPal here, so I have a question that is of interest to me. Why doesn't PayPal accept payments from countries that are outside of its PayPal networks? I understand that in the past you could choose to pay even if you don't have PayPal account.
- ppalavilli 14y agoHi - 2 separate things I guess. One can still pay with a credit card directly without requiring a PayPal account (we call it guest payment) but in most cases it depends on how the merchant has configured his payment options. But that said there are a few corner cases where we cannot allow direct credit card payments (eg. Preapprovals in Adaptive Payments) due to credit card policies. Regarding accepting payments from countries that are outside of PayPal networks, it really comes down to what is allowed by the local govt authorities around cross border transactions.
- kalleboo 14y agoStill feels like 2002 in here, 800px max width and all. I guess because I'm in Europe? http://imgb.mp/imA.jpg http://imgb.mp/imA.jpg
- ophis 14y agogo here: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/home https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/home
- usablebytes 14y agoI don't see any change at all, whatsoever.
- moe 14y agoThe title is misleading. Paypal's homepage got the makeover. The rest of Paypal.com (i.e. the actual application) is still as terrible as ever...
- v33ra 14y agoit's not just the homepage redesign - the US customers should be able to see the complete redesigned site [As per the official PayPal blog: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2012/06/paypal-com-gets-a-makeover-2/ https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2012/06/paypal-com-gets-a-make... ]
- studiofellow 14y agoI'm in the US, and I only see the redesign on the homepage, not after log in. Maybe they haven't rolled the rest out yet.
- toksogun 14y agoYeah I agree. I was looking forward to the other pages getting a makeover as well.
- da_n 14y ago"When it came to updating our website, we brought in an expert: You." I'm confused, is this a sneak peak or something? If not this seems pretty disingenuous. All they have done is put a lick of paint on the front door. I would rather they spent their resources speeding up and streamlining the site, it is painfully slow and confusing to navigate.
- josscrowcroft 14y agoI think you mean "sneak peek" (https://twitter.com/#!/StealthMountain https://twitter.com/#!/StealthMountain)
- da_n 14y agoOops, you are correct. I hang my head in shame.
- rbn 14y agoTheir API should get a makeover.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cmillllllls 14y agoCan you sayyyyyyyyyy SQUARE?
- randomdrake 14y agoWhy would you use Twitter Bootstrap and not give any credit anywhere? It feels you intentionally tried to hide some of the common Bootstrap classes with your own names like "homepageHero" but went ahead and left some of the defaults like "button primary." Also, why are there 1500+ lines of HTML, mostly consisting of whitespace? The design is just okay, but the source code and lack of attribution is really shoddy.
- anebg 14y agoLooks like the landing page for american express
- ericcholis 14y agoThis is great and all, not a bad design really. But, as a business user and developer, they seriously need to focus on performance. Their api speed has been rated extremely low (I couldn't find the source, but it's out there), which has a negative effect on customers as well as account users.
- bryanjclark 14y ago"We don't make money when you send a friend $10, so we've buried that commonly-used action in the navigation."
- zensavona 14y agoImagine what they could do if they spent the amount of time reforming their shonky business practises as they did on the new landing page.
- kmlymi 14y agoSeems like the same illustrator for Porter Airlines headed this redesign. https://www.flyporter.com https://www.flyporter.com