Reduction Framework

Role: Project Lead
Company: PayPal EMEA
Project: Design Concept

What is the project about

This was a design concept project. The vision was to create a tool to be used during group design discussions to help get a clear direction.

What problem we trying to solve

Many times during design critique sessions (UX, UI, VXD, Content) one can get lost in the details, especially if your group if diverse stakeholders have a different opinion.

How we did it

To help steer design reviews and critique sessions, we created a set of cards with specific design principle messages to help guide the direction we should take. For example, imagine we are looking to design a flyer to promote a specific service, but we have so much content from the product and marketing teams, and everyone is saying, “Yes, but we must have this” and, “We must have that?” - leading to no consensus.

So we came up with a set of Design Principles to help challenge when we can’t agree…

Hide, Merge, Delete, Reuse, Harmonise, Organise

The next step was to create a set of cards where the graphic or icon would convey the each design principle

Measuring success

The cards designs (principles and corresponding graphics) when through various consultations and design iterations, and once good enough we ran some workshops with teams to test the product - which was very well received.

We were very fortunate to also have the product concept reviewed by John Maeda, who was at the time PayPal’s ‘Design Visionary’ in a advisory capacity.

The design process

Design workshop

At first we started a simple design workshop with several colleagues. Flushing out what we believe were the key things to consider when designing, such as empathy, mobile first, to organise and to reuse (a component or design feature).

Card iconography

From the initial brainstorm we narrowed down the icons to 5 for each design principle. Designing first in black & white to get balance and shapes right.

The card front symbolised the place we wanted to get to with the design (e.g. to much content we should consider deleting something).
The back of the card would show the state of where we did not want to be (before and after)

Colour explorations

Concept for printing on recycled paper

Card design concept 2

Trying out an alternative design we the common base element was all the same, in this case the ‘circle’

And finally putting it to the test…