"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.
It'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.
Considering 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.
That 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Most 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.
Same 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.
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.
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.
I'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.
Hi. 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.
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.
Please tell me why for years you have made me suffer a slow PayPal website. Some pages take up to 5 seconds to load. PayPal is infuriating to work with.
That probably needs internal architecture redesign work - it won't be a UI issue but a back-end scalability one (and presumably a problem that can't be fixed by throwing more/better hardware at it, or they'd have done that).
11 seconds to load the login page? How on earth can anyone design a system that is that slow on a page that doesn't even load account details?
15 seconds to load the history page?
Loading the homepage 3.5 seconds?
It's ridiculous and I have absolutely no idea how anyone could write something so impressively slow. Notice the funny response from Paypal support "For the getting to the home page it only took 2 seconds and for logging in it only took 6.5 seconds."
Only 6.5 seconds to login lol?
I've also been experiencing other issues such as the cookies it set exceeding the maximum length allowed by the browser which means I have to delete the cookies and login again to continue.
Their website is awful, who cares about a new skin they have when the entire website for me is barely functional.
I can't wait for Stripe to get to the UK so we have some actual other viable options.
Any chance you can post a screenshot? /anywhere is restricted to only certain locations or accounts.
Also does this internal UI change also mean the adaptive payments checkout UI will be changing? Will you guys still try and force everybody to create paypal accounts?
Sure thing. Here's a screenshot I just took of my account. I blurred out some of the information, but this should give you an idea. http://i.imgur.com/QvJNf.png
Let me ask around on the adaptive payments checkout UI. There's a lot going on right now and it's hard to stay up on everything that I'm not working on directly.
Nice 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.
Hi - 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.
"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.
Why 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.
61 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadAs 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.
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...
Other then that, looks like your standard bootstrap clone.
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.
But yes, the terrible UI doesn't help either.
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.
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.
Now the "you" part is unnecessary and quite demagogic.
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.
On the 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.
to address meric's concerns. It's a really great way imo to have a big dropdown.
Do you have any news when it would be available in the UK/Europe?
11 seconds to load the login page? How on earth can anyone design a system that is that slow on a page that doesn't even load account details?
15 seconds to load the history page?
Loading the homepage 3.5 seconds?
It's ridiculous and I have absolutely no idea how anyone could write something so impressively slow. Notice the funny response from Paypal support "For the getting to the home page it only took 2 seconds and for logging in it only took 6.5 seconds."
Only 6.5 seconds to login lol?
I've also been experiencing other issues such as the cookies it set exceeding the maximum length allowed by the browser which means I have to delete the cookies and login again to continue.
Their website is awful, who cares about a new skin they have when the entire website for me is barely functional.
I can't wait for Stripe to get to the UK so we have some actual other viable options.
Also does this internal UI change also mean the adaptive payments checkout UI will be changing? Will you guys still try and force everybody to create paypal accounts?
Let me ask around on the adaptive payments checkout UI. There's a lot going on right now and it's hard to stay up on everything that I'm not working on directly.
(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!)
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.
The rest of Paypal.com (i.e. the actual application) is still as terrible as ever...
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.
(https://twitter.com/#!/StealthMountain)
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.