Google Wallet’s New Card Stack Is Easier to Reach and Slower to Pay With

Google Wallet’s card carousel is on its way out. A server-side change reaching more Android users this week replaces the horizontal row of payment cards with a vertical stack, a layout that will look very familiar to anyone who has used Apple Wallet.

It’s a sensible idea with one annoying side effect, and which one matters more depends on how many cards you actually use.

What’s different

The old design lined your cards up in a horizontal carousel, with slivers of the neighboring cards on either side. To reach one buried deep in the row, you swiped. And swiped.

9to5Google, which saw the new layout on several devices on October 6, says the Wallet homepage now shows one full card with a sliver of a second peeking out at the top. Tap or swipe down and a fullscreen view opens that shows most of each card. Pick the one you want and tap to pay.

• Reordering cards and choosing a default now live under a Manage payment methods option at the bottom of that fullscreen view.
• Card details and transaction history have moved behind a settings gear in the top-right corner.
• The rest of the Wallet homepage, including passes, is unchanged.

How it got here

This wasn’t a surprise drop. Android Authority spotted Google testing the vertical stack in mid-September, with early reports from users in Japan and the Dominican Republic. At the time it wasn’t clear whether Google was running a small test or a phased rollout. It turned out to be the latter. The design first appeared in September and is now widening, and there’s no app update to wait for, because Google switches it on from its side.

The good: thumbs win

If you carry five or six cards, the stack is better. You see nearly everything at once instead of hunting through a carousel, and it works well one-handed, especially when your most-used cards sit toward the bottom of the screen where your thumb lands. Android Authority made the same point when the test first surfaced.

The bad: more taps at the register

The trade-off is speed for anyone who regularly switches between two or three cards. One 9to5Google reader summed it up: “Now it requires 2+ taps whenever I want to pay with a non-default card.” With the carousel, a quick swipe got you there. Now you open the stack, then choose. Checking a recent transaction takes an extra step too, since it’s behind the gear icon.

That’s not a dealbreaker. It is the kind of friction you notice in a checkout line with people behind you.

How to make the new layout work for you

1. Open the stack, scroll to Manage payment methods and set the card you use most as your default.
2. Reorder the rest so your second-most-used card sits where your thumb naturally lands.
3. Prune cards you never tap with. A shorter stack is a faster stack.

Verdict

Google is right that the carousel didn’t scale. But this redesign is built for browsing your cards rather than paying with them, and paying is Wallet’s whole job. A quick-switch shortcut for a second card would fix most of the complaints. Until Google adds one, a well-chosen default does the heavy lifting.

Sources: 9to5Google, Android Authority, 9to5Google (rollout report). Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash.