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This is a cool project.

I am amazed that there are companies this big that investing so much time into building what’s essentially a gimmick has positive RoI




There is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem in our line of business, in that we have to convince you that we're not just normal-software-company levels of trustworthy and competent, but trustworthy and competent enough for you to put us solidly in the middle of your revenue. Additionally, due to the way our business works, we might have to do that before you even have revenue.

So we invest quite a bit in "the little things." I don't think we'd call them gimmicks. Error messages, for example, certainly aren't gimmicks; they're a classic product feature for an API, but they're afterthoughts in most places and we sweat them enough such that one of every X,000 developers debugging their integration will praise the error message (specifically) to their colleagues or friends. We aspire to that level of care up and down the stack. This includes our web presences; they're shipping software products of our company, after all.

The same sort of chicken-and-egg problem applies to hiring, by the by. The best reason to work somewhere is the colleagues. How do you let people experience the colleagues before the colleagues have convinced them to work for you? Our answer: you create replete evidence that the kind of people you'd end up working with would spend weeks getting a globe animation right and that the people who manage/promote/etc them would say "Absolutely yes, the home page redesign doesn't ship until we have a globe animation we can be proud of."


on that note, are you aware that the globe on stripe.com is rotating in the wrong direction?


This is a tricky one. The majority of worldwide software revenue comes from companies in the North Hemisphere who read left-to-right, so most globes are oriented this way.


Can't tell if sarcasm...? What I mean is that the globe should rotate towards the East, not towards the West. This is of course assuming a stationary camera!


Yes and the reply was saying that to the majority of readers (who read left to right), the globe spinning as it does, probably feels more subconsciously comfortable to our minds.

It's an artistic interpretation of a globe. It's not meant to be a scientifically accurate representation (one could say that the oceans aren't grey either, or that countries aren't sets of dots, or that the Earth isn't a sphere but an oblong spheroid, slightly squished at the poles). Again, scientific accuracy isn't paramount here.


This is actually a very intersting tangent! If I visualize interacting with a physical globe, I'm going to spin it left, as if I was "reading" the globe left-to-right. The rotation displayed on the stripe website is not the rotation of the Earth, it's the rotation of a globe!


It's not portraying any sunlight, so just think of it as the camera rotating around the globe.


I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested: does a very well-designed globe help in building trust to put you solidly in the middle of a business' revenue? Error messages are not gimmicks at all; but does a correct mapping of dots on to a sphere help you write the excellent docs that Stripe is known for?

(the developers did an incredible job on that infographic and it's great)




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