How Stripe Designs Websites
> First and foremost, their products are easy to use. That's #1. But right after that is the design of their products.<p>Based on this quote and the article, I think that when you say "design" you mostly mean "the way it looks" or "graphic design". That's just one design skill among many, and arguably the least critical one to the success of a product (don't skimp on it, though!).<p>When you talk about the product being "easy to use", that's because it was designed to be easy to use. Intentionally. Probably through a lot of trial, error, prototyping, and user testing. That's 100% design.<p>Anyways, taking your writeup as more of a critique purely of the graphic/interaction design, here are some thoughts:<p>- I would love to have seen more exploration of how Stripe approached the typographic choices. Is there a system there? What are the roles of the different bits of typography on the screen? Are they using 20 distinct font/color/weight pairings, or 3? What about the emotional impact of the font? Why do you think Stripe (very consciously) chose this font to present themselves? The world of typography is fascinating and quite accessible.<p>- The "hovering" behavior on the buttons is more "Interaction Design" than "User Experience". I think these are skillfully done - emotive, but not ridiculous - subtle, but not invisible. It would be interesting to see how the experience gets better/worse as you start fucking with the animation curves/colors.<p>- Agreed, they have a great color palette. I would love to have seen your thoughts on why they picked these colors. Is each used in a specific role? See above questions on typography. Also, keeping with the "practical" slant of the article, maybe link to one of the better color palette generators out there?<p>I think you'll notice that even on the aesthetic level, a lot of the above questions are aimed at teasing out some kind of a "design system" that lived in the designers heads and produced the website you're critiquing.<p>Good design is never an accident, and if you want to help people design better websites, the most useful thing you can do is help them understand <i>how</i> great design happens. By looking at the tradeoffs and struggles and decisions from other (successful) design projects, you gain some new lenses through which to view your own work.<p>Anyways, thanks for taking the time to put this together, and please keep writing about design for a developer audience!