I wonder how much of Stripe success is due to their gorgeous UIs and overall design, I hate when people say "Design is nothing, content is what matters..." and I love when companies like Apple and Stripe demolish these stereotypes. Design is AS important as content, great content & features will be unnoticed if they are buried under outdated and unfriendly UI design.
I think this confuses causality to an extent. Aesthetic design has to be a natural extension of the underlying product.
A beautiful website for Porsche/Apple/Stripe and other highly-regarded products inspire confidence.
Apply this same design to Dell's website and people won't take it seriously.
In my recollection, Stripe's focus on aesthetic design didn't begin until the core problem of simple credit card processing for developers had been solved. Once they gained trust with their customers as a brilliantly-engineered product, beautifully-designed UI's followed.
I don't believe gorgeous or ugly UI came into consideration when we switched payment system for my SaaS to Stripe. Our main consideration were ease of integration, payments transfers from Stripe to our Bank, and User payment dispute resolution. I doubt it we ever check Stripe dashboard and use Stripe App since the integration. Only time we go look at anything on Stripe site is when we need look up something new we are trying to integrate or user payment related issues. I would love to know how Stripe users are using the dashboard and other UI oriented stuff beyond APIs. What values do these thing add to users' business.
However, the things you love about Stripe - like its ease of integration - likely come from the same dedication to quality and user experience that went into the design. Amazing UIs are often an indication of a well-thought out product in which a lot of time went into all the details, including UI and functionality.
A product that cuts short on presenting a polished product on the outside, may very well have the same ugliness to its internal components.
Or, as sometimes happens, 90% of the effort went into the design, and the product itself is crap. That happens too. ;)
If this were true, we wouldn't need to be constantly reminding people to not judge a book by its cover. That said, great novels have been judged so by their content, not their cover. So it seems that the whole of it is more complicated than any part.
Maybe something like: It must look good to get attention. It must be good to keep it. But if something that looks better comes along, it will steal attention, at which point you can only recover it if you remain better.
Not sure you mean the app or in general, but I opened this webpage in landscape mode on an iOS device and it looks comically broken, with overlapping elements, text that can't be read and so on.
I'd rather have a website that works and doesn't have a gorgeous UI. Sure, ideally we could have both, but these modern web UIs are quite unreliable in my experience.
> I hate when people say "Design is nothing, content is what matters..."
Design is absolutely essential... but only if everybody else is doing it.
(In that sense, it is a bit like advertising.)
Design and advertising are distorting the free market. We cannot see if one product is better than the other by looking at its design. We can only conclude that one company has put more effort into the design of a product, than another company and from there we often end up with the fallacy of concluding that one product must be better than another.
However, advertising and design nowadays only show that one company has bigger pockets. Or, in other words, money is spoiling (through design and advertising) the evolutionary properties (in terms of quality) of the free market.
From the moment that you acknowledge that red text on a blue background is hard to read and makes a product genuinely worse, you must acknowledge that the design of a product is a legitimate part of a product.
Design and usability go hand in hand, and _of course_ a product's usability is a genuine part of the feature matrix of products. Sure, some design differentiation is "marketing" , but you also have designs that genuinely make a product better/worse.
I don't use Stripe and have no reason to, but a) that demo of the UI on the page is fantastic, and b) if that's what the UI is actually like, it also looks fantastic. (I mean, it looks like it works in a way which is fantastic. And visually it looks good too.) Good on 'em.
