WhoBuilt

How Stripe Built Their New Website

Apr 22, 2026· 44 min· 94K views·Watch on YouTube

Speaker

Katie Dill, Stripe’s head of design, joins Y Combinator’s Design Review to explain how Stripe rebuilt its homepage and how AI is changing the team’s design process.

Why Stripe updated the homepage

The previous homepage launched in 2020 and still worked well, but Stripe’s business had expanded beyond payments to include billing, tax, revenue recognition, and platform products. The growing page had accumulated sections and lost a clear narrative, while the design system needed a more flexible visual direction.

A clearer story of Stripe’s scale

The new homepage aims to show who Stripe serves and how its products fit together. A GDP counter communicates the scale and trust behind Stripe, while a visual bento section introduces products such as payments, billing, issuing, stablecoins, and platform tools. Modals offer more detail without sending visitors away from the homepage.

Exploration, motion, and craft

The team refined animations through prototypes, adjusting details such as speed and the number of lines so motion felt purposeful rather than distracting. They also built a tool to explore wave designs by changing blur, grain, scale, rotation, and color. When the animations were not smooth enough, the team delayed launch to finish them properly.

How AI fits into the design process

AI helped the team create image variations and test prototypes more quickly, including changes to copy for different users. But generated images still needed close review: small details such as a hand, shadow, or brand-specific layout could feel wrong. Dill said AI speeds up exploration but does not replace design judgment, craft, or attention to detail.

Quality through the user’s eyes

Dill sees design systems and AI tools helping more people create consistent work, while designers focus more on new interaction patterns and better experiences. She urged teams to resist settling for work that is merely good enough, prototype experiences rather than only presenting explanations, and assess trade-offs from the user’s perspective. Stripe’s practice of “walking the store” helps teams spot broken journeys across products and disciplines.

Takeaways

  • Use a homepage to explain how the business has changed, not just to add new product sections.
  • Show the breadth of a product visually, then let visitors choose when to explore details.
  • Prototype in the context users will experience, since isolated designs can feel different on the live page.
  • Use AI to expand the range and speed of exploration, then review the details with human judgment.
  • Regularly test connected user journeys across teams to catch problems that are invisible within one product area.

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