Paypal's logo designed to look like a recommendation? | Hacker News Reader

Paypal's logo designed to look like a recommendation?

openmymind.net

131 pointslatch54 comments

First of all, this isn't PayPal's logo, it's just a button, and if anything "The safer, easier way to pay" may be their slogan. The button itself is just a web graphic that contains their logo. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but to designers/marketers (me), this stuff is important. Think of someone trying to offer the general Hackernews user some insight by discussing some aspect of Microsoft's Internet Explorer search engine - makes you grind your teeth.

Anyway, to comment on the actual content of the parent, I would say having the PayPal button designed to look like a recommendation is definitely the case. All calls to action should be designed to be as enticing as possible (Within ethical limits of course - stray outside of those and you break the UX.) The really interesting part comes when you ask, "Is it designed to look like a recommendation from the site hosting the button or from PayPal itself?"

I'd say the intent is definitely the former in this case and the button was specifically to designed look like a recommendation from the button's environment as well as an endorsement from the company itself. Is it ethical? I don't know, but I think it's pretty smart.

Not sure if I parsed your comment correctly, but I'd just like to clear up that it was my understanding that that's the official button you're supposed to use, not a ploy to drive people through PayPal by me. -humble bundle cofounder

Yeah, I get that. Reading it back it's a little fought to discern, but my intent was in fact to convey that all design considerations of the button and the logo was in PayPal's hands.

Congrats on the bundle by the way. It's great product!

In our online store 'The safer, easier way to pay.' is a part of the page. The logo gif and the markup is part of the specs when you implement Paypal. The code looks like this, and came directly from the Paypal implementation guide:

   <img src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/PayPal_mark_37x23.gif" align="absmiddle" style="margin-right: 7px;" /><span style="font-size: 11px; font-family:    Arial, Verdana;">The safer, easier way to pay.</span>

Edit: formatting

Meta: Is the scroll bar behavior in the above comment broken for anyone else? I can click and drag to scroll, but the scroll bar itself doesn't actually move until I release my mouse button. (Firefox 3.6.13 on Mac 10.4.11)

Meta reply: Nope, works perfectly for me. I am on Safari 5.0.3 on 10.6.5. Not sure about FireFox but it has always exhibited rather buggy behaviour in certain situations on Mac OS X.

Yep, you're right. It works fine for me on Safari.

yes, for me too (same version of Firefox on Ubuntu 10.04)

Meta reply 2: Works for me on Firefox 3.6.12, Mac OS 10.6.5.

Works on Firefox 3.6.13 on WinXP.

Which is smart if they're going for SEO. That button shows up everywhere.

Case in point, do a search for "Click here": http://www.google.com/search?q=click+here That's the ubiquity of the default generated code for inserting a Flash file on a web page.

PayPal has likely spent a ton of resources on figuring out exactly what is the best text to put there (and in what format), because they don't get to change it after the fact.

Removing the antialias doesn't make it look like it's part of the website. It make it look fugly. Come on guys, this is almost 2011, who doesn't have antialiased fonts on their computers these days?

between believing that fugly text is part of a logo, or part of the page, I think a lot of people would subconsciously pick the page. Most people don't know AA is something that their computer does and simply expect images (especially professional logos) to be higher quality.

Those who can't afford a high dpi LCD screen?

I don't get this... I have a 90dpi monitor and subpixel antialiasing on Linux is beautiful.

I should also point out that antialiasing (and subpixel rendering in particular) is designed for low pixel densities. High pixel density monitors do not need antialiasing. (This is why printed font rasterizers such as Metafont do not perform antialiasing.)

I've noticed that on some monitors antialiasing looks fantastic, while on others not. My sister's laptop has a smaller screen and enabled antialiased fonts, and they really do look great. But on my Samsung 2232BW, which is a 22" 1680x1050 monitor, antialiased fonts just look really bad.

So maybe it has to do with more than just DPI, but generally I've read that high-DPI screens have no trouble at all with displaying antialiased fonts. (And yes, I have tried numerous calibration tools, with no luck).

It's likely they have a different pixel color order. If the subpixels are not in the order the algorithm expects, it will look worse than without aa.

People who think standard sized text looks godawful when it's antialiased?

I was surprised that the article didn't comment on the wording of the slogan in the PayPal button. The words 'safer' and 'easier' are comparative adjectives; they create an implied recommendation for PayPal against other options, which are both less safe and less easy. The other buttons don't acknowledge other options -- rather, they merely emphasize speed: 'now' and 'fast'.

If you were a naive online shopper presented with multiple payment options at checkout, with no other information to guide you, you very well might choose the one that is labeled 'safer' and 'easier'.

(And it's worth pointing out that many people don't have a clear idea of what's going on when they click on any of the buttons. It's perfectly plausible that people will parse the PayPal slogan as a recommendation. Think of the infamous Facebook/ReadWriteWeb login incident.)

What I ask myself when I see such comparative slogans is why they often say the likes of "the safer and easier" instead of "the safest and easiest". I guess this is basic stuff for advertising pros.

Plausible reasons that come to mind: "safest and easiest"...

- sounds more open to challenge; it invites the reader to challenge such a bold claim.

- might put you in a mood to maximize. "Safer and easier", on the other hand, puts in a positive light any improvement over some other alternative, or over what you have currently. Thus it invites you to satisfice and act.

- sounds more like bragging, like a phrase said from the advertiser's perspective. "Safer and easier" sounds more like an observation from the user's perspective. I'm not sure how to argue this, but it sounds that way to me.

I think it's because "safest and easiest" is quite a definite claim - they would be saying that no other payment method is safer than them, which could lead to claims of false advertising from their competitors. "Safer and easier" doesn't really mean anything at all without knowing what it is being compared to.

But I also agree with your assessment - safer and easier might have psychological advantages

I think it's also interesting to note the Amazon button. The button has a strong call to action ("Pay now" rather than "* Checkout *") and only mentions the method (Amazon payments) underneath. This (I think) is a good method to get those users who don't have a preference (or don't know the difference) between PayPal, Amazon, or Google Checkout.

The Amazon button was also the most appealing to me, because it looks the most like my internal notion of what a "Buy now" button should be. I'm so trained by my experience on Amazon that that's what I click to make the purchase that it's the natural place I want to click to buy--even on a different site.

If anything, it's the Google Checkout graphic that seems to fit better with what he's saying. To my eyes, the Paypal text looks more a part of the graphic that the Google version does.

Of course I could be in a minority but I reckon you could place these logos on a number of modern websites and I bet Google's 'text' would fit the layout style best.,

I agree, the Google Checkout tagline looks like it would be more part of the page than the Paypal one.

Fox News has a slogan 'fair and balanced' underneath their logo. It doesn't change my opinion.

It's a rule I called 'Processed Cheddar Cheese Food'.

When I worked at McDonalds (1st year of university) the cheese slices for the burgers were delivered in a box marked 'Processed Cheddar Cheese Food Product'. I built the rule then and there: If you have to say it's food, it probably isn't.

I now apply that in the business world. Got a slogan that says 'We're the best' or 'Fair and Balanced'? Processed Cheddar Cheese Food.

There is a fine line. Sometimes you need to make a statement of this nature. A sniff test (bs detector) usually helps in borderline cases. If you even have to ask whether the rule applies, it probably does.

I'd imagine the 'food' part of that label might be required by law because the amount of actual cheese the 'food stuff' contains is minimal :)

Very well said. I've seen the same with "Cranberry juice drink". It's not cranberry juice, it's a cranberry juice-ish kinda drink.

All "American Cheese" of that type is labeled this way. Check any package at the supermarket, from Kraft to the house brand. The phrasing is likely an FDA requirement of some type.

whoosh

The article is claiming that it looks like the site that is using Paypal (as opposed to Paypal itself) is the one that is calling Paypal "The safer, easier way to pay." To build on your analogy, if there was an independent site that provided links to news stories, and the Fox logo was designed to look as follows:

  "Upcoming Political Race Heating Up"
  Read about it on:
    ___   __             __ 
   |     /  \ \ /       /  \ |\   | |\   |
   +--- |    | X       |     | \  | | \  |
   |     \__/ / \      |     |  \ | |  \ |
   fair & balanced      \__/ |   \| |   \|

which one is the average visitor more likely to click? In this case, Fox has designed its logo to look as though the independent site is saying that Fox is "fair and balanced." If someone else appears to be endorsing Fox, it's much more likely to sway opinion. That's the whole point of the article.

I'm going out on a limb here - but I think the majority of people aren't stupid, and would realise where both statements originate from.

BTW - I love your ASCII art logo design.

I take issue with the word "stupid" being used this way to refer to the masses in design discourse.

People don't have to be stupid to be manipulated in the way the author suspected; it just takes being busy, having a specific goal that one wants to realize (buy software) and focusing on it, and not being particularly interested in the internal implementation details of the mechanism of manipulation.

Well, point taken - I think most people today, aren't naive enough to take these messages at face value.

As marketeers become more sophisticated, and choose to employ more devious methods of swaying opinion - the ability of the general population to successfully decode these messages improves.

Take a look at some advertising messages from the 50s, or some propaganda posters from the first or second world war - their messages wouldn't hit home today (unless they're served together with a liberal dose of irony).

Audiences become more sophisticated over time.

Do you know how many people get taken in by phishing scams every day? Do you know how many people blindly click the top result for the search "facebook login" and assume it is Facebook's login page even when it's on a different domain? Do you know how many people even know what a Web browser is?

The answers to the above questions are, respectively: "A lot," "A huge number" and "Less than 8%, according to a Google survey."

Right; and the people in the "What is a browser?" video [1] are not stupid; they're busy, have adapted very well to the extreme compartmentalization of 21st century Westernized life and knowledge, and are largely uninterested in what we know as computing. To invoke a central theme of "Paradox of the Active User" [2]: they're all experts in one field or another, and would make many a hacker here look like someone who doesn't know what something as supposedly generic as a "browser" is in their respective fields. That's far from "stupid".

You could replace a good 80% of the instances of "stupid" with "busy" in design discussions, and you'd end up with better discussions.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

[2] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/activeuserparadox.html

I believe it's intentional that they want you to think their method is safer, etc, but I don't believe it's an attempt to make it look like part of the site.

Somewhat meta: why offer a customer three ways to pay? It's confusing; which one do I chose? What if I pick the wrong one?

Your concern is legitimate, but you'd have to look at real data to see if the impact of that confusion is outweighed by the impact of forcing people to register for another payments service just to buy your product. I know that I don't want a PayPal account or Google Payments account. Without the option to use Amazon Payments, I would have not bought the Humble Indie Bundle. I suspect many people felt the same about the other payment options.

I seem to recall being able to make a payment with a credit-card via PayPal without setting up an account. That was at least a few years ago; is that no longer possible?

Probably, but part of the reason I didn't want to register for a new account was just so I wouldn't have to go through inputing all my information again.

It is.

I thought the same thing when I came across the logos on the page earlier today. Thought it was very smart

All good design is intentional by definition.

if only they put this level of attention to use on their adaptive payments checkout flows

Doesn't matter. Google's got the feature I want. It respects my most preferred form of payment and it damn fast.

Rubbish.

Care to elaborate why? (If not, just vote down or flag instead of posting.)

why on earth is this rant at the top of HN home?

Because it's a post dealing with UX and logo design, two topics that are extremely relevant to developers.

I'm still not convinced, the argument is poorly reasoned. The PayPal button might just look oldish style on purpose because that would imply PayPal is the old player (thus more trustworthy) but it doesn't stand out more than the other buttons. Maybe it does look like a recommended choice just because it's the first one in the row.

That's the article's point--it's not supposed to stand out. Author is suggesting PayPal designed the button so it integrates into a variety of web pages. The button seems more authentic and secure because of this--as though the web site suggests you use PayPal.

Even if the button isn't designed with that in mind, it's an example of how small design decisions can have a large impact on perception.

The way I see it (and it was poorly explained, I agree) is that because the text below the paypal button looks like it is part of the host website, rather than the button image, it appears that the website is recommending paypal over other payment options.

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