Rebranding the Wise design system for everyone (part 1)
wise.design
wise.design
That said, there was no need to rebrand as Wise either, as everyone still calls it "Wise (formerly known as TransferWise)" online, because "wise" is too generic a word to be a good enough selector.
I'll keep using you, because you have a good engineering department and you're the only game in town, but things like this are a tell that the business is starting to drift away from core priorities.
This reminds me of the similarly poor branding change done by Toggl, where they changed from a nice, visually comfortable theme, to a conjunctivitis themed one.
These behaviours are what I call "do-stuff-itis", which can indicate too much staff in certain areas of the business or overall, or weakness in the executive team.
Did you even read the
> In lots of countries, you have to get at least an AA rating by law.
part? Or what about this part
> there are approximately 300 million people with colour blindness worldwide
The old web app was spartan and utilitarian. The new design looks faddish, CashApp-style - creepy bling icons floating in space everywhere. They've removed familiar and useful UI and replaced it with 1000x1000 spunky skeuomorphic splash icons that blink in and out of existence with every user action.
Want to talk about accessibility? All the new javascript added to run the animations probably breaks a bunch of browsers.
It slowed me down.
I was replying to the fact there obviously are reasons to do this. Whether or not they did it well is another matter and I don't use Wise so I have nothing to add to that. I generally agree that modern web technologies are in an increasingly sorry state, but once again this has nothing to do with the design itself (the subject of the article and the subject being criticized) but rather the tech stack/implementation
Though I do think the colors are pretty
How about making the site more usable to the 1 in 12 men^ with the most common form of colour blindness? (Never mind the fewer women, and the less common types.)
So why would a green design be better than a blue design? Naively, it's strictly worse.
'Mixing up red & green' is one type (or a trait of some types), not the only one, and it doesn't mean say 'RGB' spans only two colours - it means some shades of red appear green and vice versa. It can also depend on context (red laser pointer invisible over a sea of green, say) and knowledge of the difference (presenter says something about their red laser pointer).
There's no problem with using green, it's requiring it to contrast with red that's potentially problematic. For that reason it's probably a good general theme/background colour, even if that was the sole reason they were choosing one, because you'd be unlikely to want a contrasting red text colour over green background anyway.
Don't all problems go away if you're just using blue?
If you see the image under the "Double the tests, double the success" subtitle you'll see that the blue colours were actually failing a few of the APCA tests for colour contrast.
There's no basis for saying you have to get rid of a blue based color theme for a grotesque swamp green one, otherwise PayPal would be an accessibility pariah.
I probably shouldn't be so sensitive to this, but it's part of the ongoing theme in the tech sector of snatching the lolipop from the baby. Give it, let them enjoy it for a while and get used to that, then spoil it.
They're all blending into each other and I guess the only way to differentiate in "Fintech 23" is pretty colours.
After thinking about it some more, it is because the rebranding is "fun". I'm transferring significant amounts of money through this company. I don't want fun. I want someone I can trust, that's it. The TransferWise to Wise rebranding was seamless and didn't damage trust. I'm going to keep using Wise because they're the best option right now. However, starting up the app for the first time after the redesign was incredibly uncomfortable, and that feeling hasn't gone away.
That's because they probably don't want to. Even those who do "data-driven decisionmaking" usually tend to massage it to fit their narrative.
Too many hires?!
My 85 year old dad has completely given up on using technology. He has always struggled with it, but at least in the Windows 95 / Windows 2000 days, things were pretty consistent: an embossed button, that looked like a physical button, was clickable. A scroll bar meant that there was more. Icons usually had significantly different colors from each other and so were easily distinguishable.
Now days, how am I to explain to him what can be clicked, and where you can drag to scroll? Every app has their own "visual design language", and all try to aim to be as flat, colorless, and minimal as possible. You have to know "secret codes" like where to swipe, to do actions. It's tough for folks who don't live and breathe software every day all day.
Power users want settings and customizability to make their flows better, but those are not "beautiful" or are "distractions". See: the decline of evernote.
Then came the double punch of web and mobile. All the hard-won lessons of desktop consistency were thrown out of the window. Many UI designers used to have a background in psychology and cognitive science; they were replaced by graphic design graduates whose primary concern was picking custom fonts and drawing pop-up menu buttons that look nothing like the OS standard component.
A lot of managers got “design thinking” religion and drew exactly the wrong lessons. They started believing design leadership is a fourth-grade Steve Jobs imitation: wear a turtleneck, bark opinions in meetings, and make sure their product UI is a completely custom thing with lots of blank space, no useful information density, and controls that look like plain text.
There’s no going back. Apple could have made a difference by enforcing iOS UI guidelines more strongly in the early days of the platform, but that opportunity was lost. The web remains beyond hope as even the most basic UI components are constantly reinvented by graphic designers wielding Figma because the browser is a useless UI platform.
Accessibility has dramatically gone downhill since then. Everyone's re-inventing the same thing in Electron, but rarely do they reach the usability of a standard dialog in Windows 2000.
Dark Mode is particularly my pet peeve: as long as applications in that era referenced OS color constants instead of hard-coding color values, they automatically followed OS color scheme without any extra work. Nowadays companies put out press releases and blog posts and parade dark mode around as if it was an achievement.
I can't help but to wonder what UI that's designed for maximum usability and familiarity would look like. Something extremely boring and functional, perhaps close to the old Windows looks, before they had a bunch of different design systems in the same OS.
Perhaps a vaguely modern project like this would be something like SerenityOS: https://serenityos.org/
Or, for something more mainstream, I think Linux with XFCE and one of the Redmond themes comes close, but then again lots of software doesn't conform to that (e.g. anything that's based on Electron): https://www.xfce-look.org/find?search=redmond
That said, the Wise design looks appropriate when compared with the current state of the rest of the industry and the color contrast compliance is nice.
Prime example, a few screenshots down you see a form layout for some “myself” profile. They’ve gone in and pointed to random colours with “WCAG AAA/AA” and the contrast ratio. Great. But the toggle button it shows is pretty ambiguous considering the light grey on white background they’re using. Is the form accessible just because the colours are contrasty enough?
No one reads the WCAG spec but everyone loves to cite the tables of acceptable minimums from it!
I’ve seen some design systems that people actually make use of, and they’re never as verbose as this kinds are.
now it’s replaced with two CTA buttons to sign up etc.
I like that their rebrand is focused on accessibility.
Can't Wise find anything more interesting to do? It's a boring change of paint coat, coupled with evangelical false prophet language that seriously reduces trust in a company that wants to handle your money.
Some do find it interesting, and would rather not have to wade through this swamp to have a conversation about it.
The conversation should go: “wow that’s amazing” “yeah it’s also way more accessible”
Rather than: “That looks like shit” “The reason it looks like shit is accessibility”
It gives accessible design a bad rep.
Edit: I say this as a regular user of wise. I recommend it to other businesses I work with and it gave the impression of a serious professional brand. I wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable anymore because the branding is much more casual and feels like it’s aimed at consumers & lifestyle biz far more than businesses that want to pay an international invoice.
Who exactly is the target audience of crap like this? Are there really folk out there who are genuinely wowed by this rhetoric?
If you wanna critique the design itself, I have nothing to say about that.
But, fwiw, you're the only one I've seen in this thread criticize that the new design is "bland" but you're entitled to that opinion. What decisions would you wish they'd made differently to make the new design less bland and confusing?
Nowadays, I tend to use it as my ATM card when traveling abroad since you can do the currency conversion before the transaction and be a little more certain you’re not taking out too much. The fine grained transaction limits for a large variety of card uses in the app is best in class too
But if I could I guess it would be easy to read and look cool!
PS.
As a Wise user I can say I was cautious coming to Wise for the first time post-redesign but I found it just as easy to work with, the GUI mostly gets out of the way like before. From designer’s standpoint I think getting rid of dark contrast blue areas helps visual hierarchy and overall the tones are not distracting but aesthetically pleasing.
I’d request the wise team to focus on the core product in addition to making necessary ui/ux enhancements. I use wise heavily and the recent experience has me looking for alternatives
It is not one of those "I got used to the design so much so this change annoys me" - it is one of those "works useful, iconic, and there was no point in ruining it."
This behavior reminds me of "justifying" their job or gaining points in front of the Management by having useless but visible projects (something I have heard was a frequent problem at Google fwiw).
Green color is great for enabling color-blind folks to navigate. Sure, but it did not require a completely cartoonish overhaul of the UI Design.
Font is too big, website is a mess with whitespace, and currency calculator now require scrolling down. It is very difficult in terms of legibility.
I abandoned (Transfer)wise a long time ago for reasons, but i always liked their Web app, compared to the mobile only Instagram-Story like nonsense Revolut turned into. Now looking at wise's mockups I see that the problem is clearly in me, and their focus group is indeed the TikTok generation.
Fun fact about my tiny (possibly bankrupt) former bank 10y ago: they didn't have an IBAN and thus weren't able to transfer money internationally. In their landing page they promoted Transfer Wise as a "reliable and cool" solution with which I can do my international transfer.
Well well, little did they know that they were suggesting that I use their 1) disruptor 2) now direct competitor.
I mean, even as a Northern European, I expect to see something like "£2163.00" for a balance in British Pounds, or (of course) "€4,718.16" for something in Euros. Obviously that would extend to "$4711.17" for something in US Dollars, too. I admire the clarity of spelling it out in full, at the same time as I'm uncomfortable about the missing symbol. Does that make sense?
Of course for my native Sweden, which is not in the Euro zone, it would be even more interesting the the name of the currency is (shocker) in Swedish, and the symbol too. Translating monetary values is non-trivial, basically. I guess if the app is in Swedish, I would expect the "4.711,17 kr" formatting (yes, we use thousands period and decimal comma) but if it were in English that would be "SEK 4,711.17".
Way to much whitespace, the bg texture all over the place only ads non sensical visual noise, the green base colour is off compared to the old more dull blue reflecting a "serious" business.
This new retro 2001'ish texturing aesthetic is way too special for a money transferring service, including the "music poster font". And i like that dot-com aesthetic, but it can't just be pasted on-top of a modern layout. It needs to be compact and subdued by a tight grid.
The old app looked clean and worked great, and was honestly one of the reasons i choose this service for several business.
This design makes me want to leave and lots of people i know would think 'what??' if i recommended a page looking this for anything serious.
I do wonder if the business is in good health longer term. Unusual to shift perception and target audience when things are going well. Some increased fees recently too, albeit expected given the economic climate. Doesn't fill me with trust personally.