I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.
Building a Developer Cult
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#12I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.
Agree, I think they accidentally swapped the layers in Sketch or Photoshop or something. Or maybe that’s some cult thing!
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#13I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.
Agree, I think they accidentally swapped the layers in Sketch or Photoshop or something. Or maybe that’s some cult thing!
It's one of those weird swirly gradient things, not really my cup of tea, but it looks _a lot_ better animated, on the page than the still.
https://stripe.com/, though I don't suppose anyone is going to have difficulty finding the stripe homepage.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#14There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life).
People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they didn't want to spend a couple more hours using crappier API's or digging through crappier API documentation.
It made no sense to me at the time because while Stripe was nice, it was usually only a matter of a couple hours/days to implement any of the other big payment processors of the time. I guess that shows what the power of cultish developer zeitgeist can do.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#15What makes Stripe good now is what made it good way back when they first launched: Handling payments sucks and they make it suck less. The design, etc. is the gravy on top of a successful runaway train.
I second that!
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#16I believe they also built a in-house main website, so that the entire company was on the same page on things. It seems like what they are very goo dat, and I think this resonates well with developers, is providing a delightful experience. This goes a long way with enjoying using the product, and you can tell they really care about what they present out to the world.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#17Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things. "What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but…
Execution is key.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#18Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things. "What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but…
If you work in an organization where this isn't the norm-- do you try and change it, or is it best to move on? Sometimes, it feels difficult knowing I made one corner of the product great when there's glaring issues elsewhere, and my team doesn't have the bandwidth (or jurisdiction) to fix all of it.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#19What makes Stripe good now is what made it good way back when they first launched: Handling payments sucks and they make it suck less. The design, etc. is the gravy on top of a successful runaway train.
This is mostly it.
Before Stripe payment processing was abysmal. There was no thought at all given to the developer/implementer experience.
Stripe basically put a clean and straight forward API and product around the mess.
I know java is 'not cool' but it feels like javadocs in 2002 which are generally well organised by virtue of myriad of conventions, as opposed to docs in some other langs. which can be hit and miss, though getting better.
Stripe is a pretty good example of good product experience for those having to 'do the work', because they will likely have a lot of say in it, in the long run.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#20Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things. "What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but…
I'll warn against getting way too focused on this as an early company.
Getting something up and running is often waaaaaay more valuable then achieving Stripe level UX from the outset, and then as time progresses you must make a conscious effort to improve. Remember, Stripe has been an app for about a decade. That's a decade's worth of learning what users care about and what details matter. And clearly that's a decade to polish a product to near perfection.
A trap I've fallen in myself, and I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. Often you'll only learn that by having a product that works and customers need from the outset.