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Comment by northernman | Hacker News Reader

Nice article, but please don't draw the conclusion that this design has anything to do with Stripe's success. Rather, they can afford to put this level of effort into the design as a consequence of their success.

Check out the Wayback machine to see early versions of their website.

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I disagree. The design definitely has something to do with their success. It isn't everything, but it has an impact. First and foremost, their products are easy to use. That's #1. But right after that is the design of their products. That's not just visual design, either. It's also the user experience. I think you're underestimating how much good design affects you subconsciously.

For me, the documentation was a top selling point which included code and curl commands with your api key, ready to be copy and pasted if you were logged in.

That's an example of great design.

it's an example of great UX, of which good UI (design) is part.

no, both ui and ux are a part of design.

Everyone has their own interpretation, but the predominant viewpoint is that "design" is the superset, with UI and UX both being subsets.

i.e. all UI is design, but not all of design is UI.

good to know, I stand corrected - I wasn't aware of that viewpoint.

Yeah, if it's qualified with graphical design, then will fit under UI (usually). But the argument goes that a product is "designed" (i.e. a plan of how it works, looks, and interacts with other systems), and thus has a "design", encapsulating everything from purpose through to visual look and feel.

+100: "curl commands with your api key, ready to be copy and pasted if you were logged in."

That's design.

But not the kind of design the article talks about.

Very early on, they hired Benjamin De Cock: https://dribbble.com/bdc

He's been instrumental in leading their design efforts. Ben's their secret sauce in the design department and why they've always had a great design-focused UI/UX.

I did just check the wayback machine, and as far back as I could find[0] their design has been really solid. Am I missing something or were you just guessing?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20111007130738/https://stripe.co...

I like that design even better. It explains up front what stripe is and why you should choose it, without any fluff getting in the way.

He's probably referring to this: https://www.quora.com/What-did-the-first-version-of-Stripe-l...

That's exactly what I was referring to. That page, while perfectly respectable, doesn't use fancy fonts, drop down menus, etc. which the original article highlighted.

My point is that Stripe's success was primarily driven by the excellent quality of their api and documentation, and not by fancy website design.

That success allowed them to subsequently devote the resources needed to produce the current incarnation of their website.

That design is also from 2011, nowadays it looks quite simple but back then i think it had a similar effect on people. Of course it isn't as detailed as the current one, but they are a company that values design a lot (in all areas) and it shows.

Absolutely. I use and love Stripe in my projects for its excellent documentation and simple setup. Compared to the god-awfulness that is PayPal docs, it made life so much easier. I literally could not care less about their dropdown transitions or white text on a blue background.

The fact that it is simple to setup and has excellent documentation are both factors in UX design applied to an API. UX stands for user experience, animations are one small part of it.

You say that, but it seems to me that one of the key factors in Stripe's early success was being developer-friendly in a way that no other card payment service was at the time. Part of that in turn was coming up with a good API and clean integrations at the JS level, and then documenting all of that so well that many other sites have since adopted the same presentation style for their own documentation pages.

Compare that with the obvious established competitor, PayPal, who have made a fortune from letting people collect money by putting a simple button on their site with just the slightest level of integration needed, but whose APIs and documentation have changed over time and yet remained consistently awful for developers wanting to do more substantial integrations to meet more demanding requirements.

My impression of Stripe has always been colored by their design. Anytime I see Stripe on HN, I know the page I'll land on will be stunning to look at.

I'm not even a Stripe customer but I already have a favorable view of the company because of its design

This might be part of it, but good design must also be made a priority from the top for it to happen. If it’s not, even if the company is successful, good design will generally only be limited to the foremost marketing pages and quickly degrade after that.

stripes product dashboard designs are not nearly as nice as their marketing. maybe 50% of the way there

I agree, the website and the dashboard differ significantly in design quality. At times, the dashboard is also a little buggy (e.g. views don't update sometimes even if you've just updated an item).

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