Yeah there was no reason to do this. It looked absolutely fine and trustworthy as it was before, and these resources could have been better spent addressing functional matters or adding product lines.
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.
I saw the update to the web app last night. Didn't touch the mobile app much, but the web app had an extreme makeover.
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.
The post I was replying to made zero comments on the accessibility and simply offered that there was "no reason to do this" and a waste of company resources
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
They have so much regulatory work to do for any features involving finance that making tangible progress on the current product from where they are seems exponentially harder. They can barely get borderless expanded from the current countries offered. Other countries do not want to make it easy for their citizens to send money out.
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.)
By "this" I meant the totality of what they did, not certain bits among what they did that can be "think of the children"d (recognizing that I've now given someone the opportunity to interject with a bad faith interpretation of that).
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.
No it wouldn't, but it is what the article's about. Maybe the link was changed, but I'm only aware of the 'complete and total redesign' from comments here - I've used Wise occasionally but not since it was called TransferWise I don't think, so I wouldn't have known it was so recent.
'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.
it's not about choosing only one colour, colour blindness and colour systems are more complicated than that.
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.
All these fintechs are trying to move into each other's areas.
We're not money transfer, we're a bank! Oh, and we do crypto. Does anyone want to buy shares? Mortgages anyone? Let's sell our technology back to the banks!
They're all blending into each other and I guess the only way to differentiate in "Fintech 23" is pretty colours.
More like justifying its job by creating unnecessary busywork. Accessibility concerns can be addressed without reworking the entire design and adding even more whitespace and stupid fonts/graphics.
Not a fan of the Wise rebranding. It immediately made me uncomfortable.
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.
It's still TransferWise to me :) Like all the other rebrands, the important thing was that I was sold on a different name and their service. I use it because I have to ship money to my US account monthly. The service + cost is all that matters, not silly redesigns or 1-syllable names.
I just did the update. This "upgrade" indeed sucks. It's also a mediocre job. The colors are not well picked and I feel the color palette is dizzying to the eyes.
Me too, I'm wondering why they decided to switch immediately. Why not provide user with a toggle to switch between old and new UI, then they can see how the data says
That's worse and confusing for the end user in the long run. It's also difficult and costly to keep two development lines in parallel. And confusing when giving support. My bank still has an old and a new site (or at least design) and that's been going for 5 years. Insane.
The "flatness" in many designs these days really bother me.
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.
Until the early 2000s, consistency between applications used to be a top priority in UI design. There were decades of serious usability research underpinning the Windows and Mac interfaces, and the APIs were finally getting to the point where you could spin up a standard UI with useful controls and trust that it follows platform guidelines, inherits accessibility features, etc.
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.
On top of that, I always loved that standard GUI elements like buttons and text fields came with batteries included: they could be navigated with keyboard only, they were easy to read for screen readers, they followed OS contrast settings for the vision impaired, and so forth. All of this required minimal or no effort at all on developer's side.
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.
> 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.
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.
I disagree, most apps are designed for the lowest common denominator, though they do a poor job of that.
Power users want settings and customizability to make their flows better, but those are not "beautiful" or are "distractions". See: the decline of evernote.
As a power user, I much prefer denser and more information rich UIs. Just tried Windows 11 for the first time today. The file browser's "detail" mode (which I'd consider the power user mode) has been destroyed by making it multi-line and adding a ton of padding, so now I can only see half has many files on a screen as before...
I find these sorts of shallow design specs irksome. There’s so much fluff to make this seem more thought out and systematized than it was.
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.
Especially, provided that this actually a good old tab interface. Not that there had been a time when we knew how to make tabs unambiguous that anyone could still remember, but… Ok, on closer inspection, is this rather a horizontally laid out select (or radio group)? Does the content below change with options? Is there anything, so we could tell, whether it's tabs or a select and what the consequences are of choosing either option? Is the vertical white space a functional divider/separator or just flat UI design? I guess, the transaction business is just a leap of faith…
I noticed an immediate loss of functionality via this redesign. The previous home page let me calculate quickly how much it would cost to do a transfer - arguably the PRIMARY value of the service.
now it’s replaced with two CTA buttons to sign up etc.
you're right, its a few scrolls down. It used to be right at the top, so it became a learned behaviour for me to go their site and quickly check the cost of a transfer versus what my bank offers me.
Company does rebrand. And right on cue, a bunch of comments saying it's rubbish and unnecessary. Honestly, can't we find anything more interesting to say? Within a few years, this design will be redesigned, and all the same hackneyed criticisms will be rolled out again.
I like that their rebrand is focused on accessibility.
> Honestly, can't we find anything more interesting to say?
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.
As a heavy user of Wise I can have my opinion on the user-facing side of their business. I trust them with my money and my trust is dependent on their conduct. They've been sending a dozen e-mails to me about this redesign, so apparently they think it is very important.
I don’t understand why you would do a redesign (and in the past a rename) that takes all the visual distinctiveness of the brand and just chucks it in the bin. The whole thing feels like a ripoff of cash app’s vibe, the typography comes across as very unserious, and whilst I appreciate that colourblindness is a good thing to design against, that feels like an excuse to justify throwing the baby out with the bath water. I loved the old spinner for instance. Now it feels like a video game loading page.
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.
"Opening the world up" is them signalling that the rebrand is focused on accessibility and I feel like this point was lost on GP. That's all I'm addressing
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?
I like the new look. I’ve been a huge wise user, it was the cornerstone of my finances when living abroad for a few years. I cannot imagine how much harder it would have been trying to survive on the other viable alternative at the time, HSBC or western union. Using your own banks debit card abroad for an extended amount of time is a recipe for having your accounts closed due to lack of domicile.
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
That's cool and all, but my card expired and while trying to replace it (I have to re-send some bank info for some reason) at some point a progress button ("next") would become unresponsive in whatever browser I tried...so now I can't use Wise any more.
But if I could I guess it would be easy to read and look cool!
I subscribe to their 'Wise Rate Alerts' by email. The old message design was quickly readable with exchange rates side by side. The new one needs me to scroll down and to take time and think about what I'm looking at.
Nice write-up on the basics of color and accessibility. If you are like me and get lost in the seemingly unlimited choice of colors and palette options when designing GUIs, the sanest way to go about it is to 1) test for accessibility (WCAG, etc.) and 2) pick something that looks good (if you operate within the constraints of the first, you will find the range of the second narrow substantially).
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 have no opinion on the wise design redesign except the app is beginning to break ( can’t edit failed transfers, web app points to email and email points back to web app), non existent customer support with standard templates with execs in the UK time zone.
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
I have been using Wise (formerly TransferWise - which is how I still refer to it) for close to 8-9 years at this point...and this UX/UI design is one of the most horrific and unpleasant one I have seen in years.
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've never used Wise (or hardly heard about it), but I think their use of textual currency names under the balance numbers was ... odd.
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".
The thing is that many countries use the same symbol for their national currency (eg Australian, Canadian and Eastern Caribbean Dollars, just to name a few). Not all people are aware of what all currency symbols are (maybe except the popular $,€ and £, just look at your keyboard). What about ¥, ₤, ₩, ₫, etc.)?
Absolutely atrocious design, i honestly thought they had been hacked at first.
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.
Redesign has broken destination currency selection for me when converting from one to another. No matter what currency is selected (from preexisting balances) it always defaults to the first in the list. On iOS only - it worked via website.
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.
I use Wise strictly through the web interface and I'd say this redesign has become less utilitarian than the previous one. I yearn for the day, rebranding & redesigning into the hyped styles stops and a return to utility, especially for what is primarily a utility service/app/business is, is encouraged rather than keeping up with the joneses' hype. I use Wise weekly so I'm curious if anything breaks for me
Is it just me, or is this a fancy article with nice animations full of marketing speak, but doesn't actually mention the reason why they removed their previous blue brand/color?
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.