Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Breaks Down Their New Website

**Aaron Epstein** (0:00)
Today, I am thrilled to welcome Stripe's head of design, Katie Dill, back to the show. Katie and her team recently launched a brand new Stripe homepage. She's going to take us behind the scenes of the new website and talk about how AI is changing her team's design process. Welcome to another episode of Design Review.
Katie, thank you so much for joining us again.

**Katie Dill** (0:27)
Well, thank you for having me.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:29)
It's good to be back. I saw along with everybody else when you launched the new Stripe homepage, and I thought it would be amazing to have you on and kind of take us through the old site and things that you wanted to change about it and update, because I know it's been a few years since you launched that one. And then take us through the new one and talk a little bit about the process that you used in order to get to where you guys landed with the new one.

**Katie Dill** (0:51)
I do enjoy good design crit with you, so let's do it.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:54)
All right, let's jump into the original site. So how long ago did you launch this one?

**Katie Dill** (0:58)
This one was from 2020

**Aaron Epstein** (1:00)
Okay. So we're talking six years ago at this point.

**Katie Dill** (1:02)
Kudos to the team. I wasn't there at the time, but I do think that they built something that stood the test of time quite well.
We weren't, oh my gosh, we have to change it. It's been too long. It doesn't work anymore. It actually was standing up quite well. And when we endeavored to change it, it was because the business had just evolved beyond the point of what this story was being told on this site. And I'll explain that a little bit. Of course, we wanted to kind of freshen it up as a part of our brand that also had been evolving and becoming more sophisticated and reaching a broader set of users. But still, it was a good site. So I can point out a couple of things that we aim to change. Yeah. So one, this evolved over time. We certainly had changed the words on the site and exactly how it was portraying what we do.
And then also some of the product shots that we were including. And then of course, our users as we continue to evolve and help more in different categories or larger enterprises or growing startups. But then as you go down the page, we were articulating the number of things that we do. And this is actually one of the things that had evolved the most over the last couple of years because our product suite was evolving. And so, for example, we started with payments being a main part of our business, but over time, payments is just one part of it. We now today serve in multi-national enterprises in many categories, including helping them with subscriptions, helping AI companies with usage-based billing, tax, revenue recognition, platforms like Shopify, and helping them move money for the businesses on their platform. And so these stories were coming through here, but you were kind of only getting a glimpse of the product offering that Stripe provided. And so this was probably the biggest thing that we realized that we needed to change. So we needed to adjust that. And the other piece is that the page grows quite long. There's a lot of trying to be told here. We were doing that thing that happens over time, and you kind of add on and add on, and we're kind of losing the narrative with the site. And so we thought to think about ways that we could update that narrative. Now, of course, you could adjust that what was here, but we realized that it was also time to refresh the visuals.
I don't think that the visuals came out of fashion, but it also just didn't feel like it took the sophistication of how the business itself evolved. And we were seeing it, honestly, in the way that our teams were kind of rolling out this design language. There wasn't a lot of clarity on how do we use this 12-degree bar, how do we use colors and overlays, how do we use our typography.
The gradient wave that's at the top was certainly an element, but it didn't really scale well. So we had to create a new design vision for our language and then update the story.

**Aaron Epstein** (4:03)
It's interesting because you mentioned that visually, I look at this and this looks like a site that could have been launched yesterday. I think that's a testament to how Stripe has always been so far ahead of the game from a design perspective that you could have a site that's six years old and obviously, you made updates to it over the years. This wasn't literally the site that you launched six years ago.