PayPal Redesign | Hacker News Reader

PayPal Redesign

bruceackerman.com

56 pointswebbruce42 comments

Just a quick usability issue I noticed: The numbers in the Gross (Amount?) column are only differentiated by their color. Red-green colorblindness is pretty common, so it may be hard for colorblind users to distinguish between the two. Adding a minus sign before negative amounts would probably help a lot for them.

So true, I am red-green colorblind and I didn't notice the difference until I read your comment, they look almost the same to me.

Paypal has one of the most broken UIs I've ever seen. Not only is it horribly dated it is completely inconsistent across all of their portals. As a web payments pro member, developer, standard user there is a huge break down in consistency. The developer portal, paypal manager, standard portal, and home page all look totally different. The standard portal I can rarely find the setting I need without searching online.

Having relied on paypal to ship packages (do you sell on ebay?) it is amazing there is no button to just make a shipping label (without getting money from a specific person). You can do it, you just need to know the hidden URL (why is it hidden?).

I think it's because they expect you to follow the happy path, which is sell item, then collect payment, then ship. Shipping something without having a matching, paid-for transaction isn't a typical user path.

(disclaimer, I work for eBay inc, but not on the teams that decide that stuff. This is my personal opinion.)

I agree, but a button or link somewhere (anywhere) would be nice. Instead I have to google to find out how to do it. I've bookmarked it now ;) (I believe it is /shipnow)

Not to be too harsh, but the final design looks like a rushed Bootstrap prototype. I like many of the decisions made and agree with others here who think the navigation needs some love, but it just feels like every other flat, blue site I've seen.

Chrome says this is a reported phishing page.

seen the same with Chrome on Linux

I get this same thing but can't figure out why. The are no forms or suspicious links. Aside from Google Analytics, there's a single (conditional) JS include, and the code looks harmless. The page looks safe to me.

It's for the favicon of all things: http://bruceackerman.com/paypal-redesign/img/favicon.ico

Holy cow, Google, this is pretty good for automatic protection. It looks like Google sees that the guy is hosting the Paypal favicon (or something very close to it)... why would any legit site do that? Even the redesign doesn't need to show the Paypal favicon. So Google errs on the side of caution.

Wow, that is really cool. Good job Google!

For comparison, the actual Paypal favicon: https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/icon/pp_favicon_x.ico

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'm looking into that phishing error, strange...

Nice redesign, I often wonder why many successful companies neglect the aspect of their websites. Take IMDb for example, it has a dated design and it could be made more useful and accessible. Is it a technology problem (UI closely tied to the backend, very broad scope) or there's another reason?

My experience with this has been an aversion to disturb the existing user-base (and normally within organizations with deep-seated users). A lot of sites where you'd previously seen this type of reluctance (IMDb, eBay / PayPal, Craigslist, Amazon, Google) seem to be some of the older sites on the top end of the internet spectrum. However, luckily that attitude seems to be shifting (to varying degrees from incremental fixes on Craigslist to broad changes with Google products). In some cases, there are certainly technological constraints but I've never seen anything that seems entirely insurmountable.

I'd settle for not having to click through three screens of "yes I'm sure" and opt-in doublespeak every time I want to "really, really, I promise you" use my credit card.

I'd just like to see more than 20 transactions at a time. I'm sure the sheer number of table rows isn't the reason it takes 6-10s to load the page! (Kudos to OP for mentioning the endless scroll.)

My PP homepage and Bruce's PP homepage look really different — it almost looks like PP went through a redesign process while he were doing his redesign, and came to similar conclusions!

Yes, they're rolling out a new design right now. I have to say it's much better than before!

My issue with the PayPal dashboard is not that I can't get the information I need quickly.

My issue that I can't quickly get to where I need to go to do some specific task.

I already know my account balance and transactions from things like Xero, and when I login to PayPal it is to:

1) Manage user subscriptions

2) Withdraw money

3) Manage the API and callbacks

And I'm sure that other people doing the same.

The thing begging for a re-design at PayPal is their entire navigation and menu system.

It's so damn hard to find the right page to do the thing you want to do, and that's the problem.

Personally, the PP dashboard works great for me — I almost solely use it for sending & receiving money with friends & family. I suspect one big challenge for PP is that the majority of users have a similar use case ... but the majority of dollars are in accounts requiring the functionality you're asking for.

I have a similar usage pattern. My issue is that it is so slow. I agree, it is a confusing, but that wouldn't be a problem if it didn't take 30 seconds between clicks to see if you clicked the right thing.

The first thing I would implement is a search that accepts most things like a profile_id, transaction id, or email, and returns results within a few seconds. Right now it is about 13 clicks, and 30 second wait only to find out you didn't select the right combination of option buttons. The system is awful when you have a customer on the phone and are trying to figure out what is going on.

Great suggestions all. One of the best decisions we made was recognizing how our .com site was failing the most basic needs of our sellers. However, the challenge to change it into something that will work for millions of global sellers, is not something that can easily be done overnight. Feedback like yours Bruce is taken very seriously and we will continue to work to make access to workflows faster and smoother across all of our portals.

Cory Gaines Sr. Director PayPal Business Products

Don't like the new design. And what the fuck is "retina design"? Can we stop making up new stupid ways to describe stuff.

Design with images that are retina display ready.

2x pixel density

I'd reduce the size of the "hero banner" (is that what the large dark blue section is called?). It totally dominates the page and is hugely distracting. I'm more interested in my activity than I am in money saving tips. If that was 1/3 the size then I could warm up to it.

This reminds me of the PayPal mobile application, both in terms of organization and information priority. Both this concept and the mobile app headline account balance, simplify actions to four items, and allow the transaction log to make up the body of the content.

Look-and-feel aside, I think this concept aligns with the intent to bring parity between the mobile experience and desktop. I do worry, however, that the use cases for the desktop application may differ (particularly for bigger sellers) from the mobile, and this flow may fall apart for them.

This would be such a beautiful website for such a terrible company.

As a matter of fact, Paypal is beta testing a new design - I accepted it for one of my accounts (strangely, it's one that I use very little) and it looks quite nice.

It's not as modern as the design proposed by Bruce, but it's better than before, easier access to everything, easier to view transactions (though still limited by how far back you can go), easier to manage invoices.

I'm guessing the final version will be quite good.

My problem with PayPal isn't the ux, but their archaic process' and how they between eBay and PayPal have literally fee'd me to death.. I quit using heir service and had them cancel my accounts awhile back.. Adapt or die, I prefer paying for things on the net with bitcoin.

Why is the 'Search for transactions' field so far away from the list of recent transactions?

The paypal screens all changed for me the otherday when I was paying through it. I had to stop for a second and check it wasn't just a bad phising site, payment sites changing makes me lose trust in them :s

Is there a reason that they didn't use the HTML5 placeholder attribute for their input fields?

Maybe I'm a little OCD, but it bugs me when I'm able to select the word "Password" in password boxes.

I like the design. I'm particularly fond of large, thin typefaces.

Paypal's redesign sucks. I use to just go back to the old design when ever it gave me the option to do so. Now it seem even the option to use the old design is gone.

Can copyright law actually allow PayPal or another company to sue people who try to post such "redesigns"?

I doubt it, but just wanted to make sure.

If Paypal wanted to be shitty about it, they could file a DMCA notice against the host or bring up trademark infringement.

Most companies wouldn't, as these sorts of redesigns are done in good faith. There's always that one company though.

I wonder if it would hold up in court. It seems like this is fair use... but of course fair use is up to the courts...

Most of the time, it doesn't have to hold up in court.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/

The paypal redesign I want is where they stop showing splash ads while they take 3% of transactions for doing nothing.

They should hire you.

Hopefully, this gets someone fired too.

It will accept Bitcoin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com