PayPal.com Gets a Makeover [UI]

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/home

by v33ra • 14 years ago

67 58 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I think they're lying; the logo's not bigger.

mtgx• 14 years ago

I think they should use that mantra for their customer service division, rather than the UI design one.

tmcw• 14 years ago

Windows 7 Was My Idea! http://gizmodo.com/5477384/windows-7-was-my-idea-but-to-be-f...

TheKidCoder• 14 years ago

Great, they redesigned the side of that site that is useless to an actual user of PayPal.

whichdan• 14 years ago

Sadly, this is the truth.

veb• 14 years ago

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.

fredoliveira• 14 years ago

They'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.

Zaheer2• 14 years ago

The redesign is only skin deep. As soon as you log in you're back to the old UI.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

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.

treelovinhippie• 14 years ago

I like that photo of the lake. The tagline should be "Want to access your money? Start swimming!"

mrchess• 14 years ago

"PayPal.com gets a new landing page" is more like it.

georgechen• 14 years ago

The 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• 14 years ago

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.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Be sure to tell those folk who have had their payments refunded and violins destroyed. They'll love skin deep changes!

sgdesign• 14 years ago

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.

GvS• 14 years ago

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.

studiofellow2• 14 years ago

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.

But yes, the terrible UI doesn't help either.

fleitz• 14 years ago

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.

MrSane• 14 years ago

Yup. Could not agree more.

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

Ironically, we could see THE man land on moon who (kind of) built up paypal.

yaix• 14 years ago

Fixing 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_• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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.

conradfr• 14 years ago

I 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.

trg23• 14 years ago

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.

meric2• 14 years ago

I 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 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.

ophis2• 14 years ago

works fine on: Win7 - Opera 12

trg23• 14 years ago

That's annoying. I'll tell the guys today. Thanks for the feedback.

Zaheer2• 14 years ago

Please use something like this: http://ivaynberg.github.com/select2/

to address meric's concerns. It's a really great way imo to have a big dropdown.

littlejim84• 14 years ago

I'm quite interested by this: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-advanced

Do you have any news when it would be available in the UK/Europe?

TomGullen2• 14 years ago

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.

dspillett• 14 years ago

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).

oneplusone• 14 years ago

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?

trg23• 14 years ago

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.

cynusx• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Nice 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• 14 years ago

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.

ppalavilli• 14 years ago

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.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

Still feels like 2002 in here, 800px max width and all. I guess because I'm in Europe? http://imgb.mp/imA.jpg

ophis2• 14 years ago

go here: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/home

usablebytes• 14 years ago

I don't see any change at all, whatsoever.

moe• 14 years ago

The 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• 14 years ago

it'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-make... ]

studiofellow2• 14 years ago

I'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• 14 years ago

Yeah I agree. I was looking forward to the other pages getting a makeover as well.

da_n2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I think you mean "sneak peek"

(https://twitter.com/#!/StealthMountain)

da_n2• 14 years ago

Oops, you are correct. I hang my head in shame.

rbn• 14 years ago

Their API should get a makeover.

randomdrake• 14 years ago

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.

anebg• 14 years ago

Looks like the landing page for american express

ericcholis• 14 years ago

This 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• 14 years ago

"We don't make money when you send a friend $10, so we've buried that commonly-used action in the navigation."

zensavona• 14 years ago

Imagine 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• 14 years ago

Seems like the same illustrator for Porter Airlines headed this redesign.

https://www.flyporter.com

PayPal.com Gets a Makeover [UI]

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