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The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple's 'single 20y/o in sf' design. Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say, you have a personal accou
by kilian 5mo ago
The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple's 'single 20y/o in sf' design.
Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say, you have a personal account and a shared account with your partner) has to do the "pick between the two identical looking top 20px of cards" dance every time they use Wallet to pay for something. It is mind-boggling that the current UI persists.
- yieldcrv 5mo agolong hold to re-arrange your rearrange what your default card is - but to the bottom of the stack - is dumb
- bombcar 5mo agoApple has my location at every moment of my life, from birth to natural death, and they can't switch the default card based on the store I'm in? Will wonders never cease.
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoIt works aggressively in Walgreen's
- red369 5mo agoThis one seems harder to get right to me. The cards are stacked so that the card further down the screen is the top of the stack (the card overlap indicating which is in front of which). I would guess this was done because if you can only see part of the cards behind, seeing the top of the obscured card is more useful than seeing the bottom. I could be missing something, but where there is no perfect solution, I want to be slower to say the option they chose is dumb.
- yieldcrv 5mo agoAppeal to authority fallacy
- red369 5mo agoDo you mean that I am falling into that? Quite possible! Could you explain? I don’t see it yet. I guess I just think of it as where there isn’t an obvious correct answer, best not to criticise another choice. Especially when there seem to be inexplicable choices out there which should be criticised with higher priority! I’ve just been participating in a conversation about the two different functionalities of the wallet app. That seems clearer to me as an unnecessarily confusing experience.
- Terretta 5mo agoThe same is true in a physical card wallet. An 80 year old with early onset challenges can work this wallet, pick a card, and then hold the phone to the reader at a store. It's all co-opting "familiar" actions for them, not tech-like, which means they can do it. The biggest UX issue Apple has for that persona isn't the wallet, it's the lack of physical home button. Everyone in their 70s and up seems to be given pause every time they aren't on the screen they expect, and even to unlock it. Invisible affordances rely on memory rather than sight trigger: not good.
- gortok 5mo agoBut it’s not true of a physical wallet. I have 8 locations in my bi-fold wallet I can place any given card, orientation-wise. Lower left, lower right, upper left, upper right, inside left, inside right, dollar bills left, dollar bills right.
- mh- 5mo agoIsn't the same true of the wallet on iPhone? I drag and drop reorder my cards as necessary. There's a fixed number of positions that fit above the "fold" (in the scrolling sense).
- gortok 5mo agoNo. I have only a vertical ordering available in Apple wallet. A card can be above another card or below another card. I have 3d physicality in a wallet that Apple wallet does not replicate.
- rootusrootus 5mo agoThis has been one of my peeves for years. Apple is capable of good design, and overall is well regarded for it, but there are a number of places where they have blinders on and absolutely refuse to fix extremely obvious missteps.
- jbverschoor 5mo agoYou say good. I'd call it minimal. Minimal doesn't mean good. For example, I have bold text, larger text. On my mac I have all these contrast increasing settings enabled, simply because it's *not* good "design" It's good that it's minimal, but this minimalism is also why many things don't work (timemachine, icloud files/photos -> everything needs to be automatic, causing recurring downloads follewed cache eviction of those files). Etc etc etc
- smt88 5mo agoApple is capable of beautiful and minimalistic designs, but their usability has been terrible since basically the iPod. Minimal is often an enemy of usable.
- amluto 5mo agoThe flow for removing cards is also a fantastic exercise in slowness.
- ncr100 5mo agoHow so?
- amluto 5mo agoOpen the Wallet app (the double-tap-power view doesn’t work). Ask to delete one card at a time (which requires two taps which a short mandatory wait between them due to the animation). Tap again to confirm. Then wait an obnoxiously long time for the too-cute animation to complete. Then repeat for the next card, while wondering why there is no bulk remove operation of any sort.
- avemg 5mo agoYep! Extremely annoying when traveling with my family of four!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mvdwoord 5mo agoFirst thing I noticed too, as I have multiple cards from the same bank. I also noticed they show you last digits of the ... CARD number, not the account number which would be tremendously more helpful. But I figured out you can put little icons on the cards. Which my bank did automatically for my business account. I added a little person icon for my personal account. Maybe bank specific though but definitely super dumb that you cannot label them yourself easily in the wallet app.
- eNV25 5mo agoThat's ridiculous. The card number has nothing to do with the account number.
- bombcar 5mo agoSometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. My debit card from my credit union is easy to map to the account as they share digits, but other debit cards from other institutions are completely unrelated.
- ryandrake 5mo agoThis whole comment section looks to be turning into a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Credit Cards" blog post.
- parl_match 5mo agoYes, that's the problem.
- timacles 5mo agoWhen I first started using it I thought something was broken
- ncr100 5mo agoWhich something? The identical-ness of your particular collection of cards, in the wallet?
- OJFord 5mo agoWell, I don't know what it looks like in Apple Wallet, because I use Google Wallet, but for the same reason I'm struggling to imagine the problem because there the cards are pretty large – maybe ⅔ real card size on my Pixel 10 – and in a carousel at the top. So you can see clearly which one the active one is, and just swipe between them if it's not the one you want. Easier than my physical wallet tbh, where they're behind each other, which I say begrudgingly because I've long held out, only starting to use the app a couple of weeks ago.
- aurareturn 5mo agoWhy doesn’t the bank design a slightly different top for different cards?
- alistairSH 5mo agoBecause the cards aren't different cards. In my case, I have a personal card and a shared card from the same bank. The card type is the same, one just happens to have my spouse as a co-owner. Some banks do allow you to pick a card look/image. Most don't. But whatever the case, Apple really should allow tagging cards in the Wallet with a small icon/emoji/something. It doesn't need to be fancy - just enough to visually distinguish two otherwise visually similar cards.
- jqpabc123 5mo agojust enough to visually distinguish two otherwise visually similar cards. How about a simple, old fashioned text label for each card?
- bombcar 5mo agoFor all I know there is something like that, but it'll be buried in settings, probably in accessibility, where nobody ever goes. Discoverability of options on the iPhone is fraught with danger and distrust, I learned about CarPlay widgets a few days ago and I've used it for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rUminiQjtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rUminiQjtM
- jqpabc123 5mo agoFrom my limited experience, Apple often denies the obvious for the sake of asthetics. For example, the simple utility of a [Backspace] key.
- pseudalopex 5mo agoApple's keyboards have keys marked delete or a symbol where other keyboards have keys marked backspace, delete, or a symbol. Their utility was the same in my experience. What obvious difference did I not see?
- sitzkrieg 5mo agoapple is a masterclass of terrible uis and hidden interactions
- mikepurvis 5mo agoI'm 39M and have ended up with a bunch of different credit cards; I get annoyed picking between them even without the additional complication of them being identical in appearance. For me it's my daily driver, my Costco branded card, my airline's amex card, my USD denominated card, and my work-issued card. There are also two ATM/debit cards in there which I'll occasionally choose at small merchants where I know the CC fees hit them harder. In most cases I just want the daily driver, but the airline card gets good rewards for dining so it does come out reasonably often as well. The USD card I can mostly ignore unless I'm traveling there and can temporarily set it as the default.
- bombcar 5mo ago[dead]
- troupo 5mo agoThere's also no way to go to the wallet from the actual shortcut screen you most commonly use (the double-click power one)
- dfunckt 5mo agoWait, what? Double-clicking will prompt for Face ID to open your default card for oayment, and from there you swipe down to see the stack — which I suppose is the screen you’re looking for.
- troupo 5mo agoBut you cannot edit, add, or remove anything in this stack, and there's no way to go from it to the wallet. You have to close it, and open the actual wallet app which will show a slightly different view, and more items
- dfunckt 5mo agoYou’re right, I never noticed! This actually also explains why I couldn’t change my default card the other day - I must have been in that screen that opens from the button shortcut.
- aingisni_del 5mo agoSpot on re: App UI designed and engineered by 20y/o in SF. That is actually accurate, because that was (is?) the team that engineered it. I interviewed with them sometime ago when Apple Pay had just come out, and that entire Wallet/Passbook team seemed really toxic and ... very mediocre. Not surprising that this feature hasn't seen much improvement over time.
- conradev 5mo agoThe design is skeuomorphic, modeled after a standard bifold wallet which gives your physical cards the same treatment. My current wallet doesn't give me any affordances: https://grifiti.com/products/grifiti-band-joes-3-25-x-1-25-in-standard-bands-5pk https://grifiti.com/products/grifiti-band-joes-3-25-x-1-25-i...
- waterproof 5mo agoyour current wallet lets you add labels or stickers to your cards. classic Apple situation - look, this is super clean, intuitive software! but if you want a reasonable level of flexibility that you would expect elsewhere, you are SOL.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoNothing like having every flight you ever booked continuously stored forever. So easy to say “gee this flight was three days ago, maybe they don’t need the boarding pass anymore”. I just checked and I somehow have a covid test from 2022 stuck in there.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoYou can order them in whatever order you want and set your main one as the default.
- codesnik 5mo agogood for you and your particular bank.
- spike021 5mo agoI have multiple Chase cards but they do look different from each other physically and in the Wallet app. Isn't that just a bank issue of not making cards differentiate from each other?
- jasonmp85 5mo ago[dead]
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo agoAnother related annoyance, and I’m not sure if this is Apples fault or the developer’s fault, but things like plane tickets don’t expire out. You don’t need to auto remove them (but perhaps give me the option to opt in for that) but slightly greying expired ones out in the ui by default would go a long way towards helping with this
- lobster-emoji 5mo ago> shared account with your partner Do stupid things and the UI looks stupid. Shocker.
- okrad 5mo agoSwitching your card when using Apply Pay as part of checkout on website was better when tapping the card icon allowed you to switch the card you are paying with but since iOS 26 that is for editing your billing address… if you want to change the card you have to select option below that with no icon titled “Other Cards & Pay Later Options”
- e40 5mo agoSpeaking of that, sometimes I touch the card I want and it doesn't select it. I go through this dance of touch, wait, touch, wait, repeat. Insane.
- codesnik 5mo agogive me ability to write a damn whatever on the card. My bank provides USD, EUR and other currencies on different cards with exact same cover. Maddening. I can imagine that we don't have this option just because people would put their PINs there, and maybe it's not exactly secure enough, but sprinkle some validation on top and we'd be ok.
- KingMachiavelli 5mo agoWouldn't the app registering the card provide the card image? And actually cards from the same provider/app are suppose to occupy the same "vertical" slot but then show a horizontal dialog. Also, I bet even with the identical looking 20px preview, the actual order is consistent so just remember which is which - same interface physical cards provide. Is there a reason to not pick a single card as your default payment card? I find it's pretty rare I need to pick a card manually unless it's a store card or card for specific spending type (resturants, gas, etc.)
- duxup 5mo agoI like it. I don't really need 20 cards in my apple wallet, so I just don't ... I just keep what I need like my existing physical wallet (now smaller because of my apple wallet).