UX Case Study
Design Operations
Our Design Ops team at Global Payments ran a competition to design (in the form of a deck of playing cards) a visual language for our core design principles.
And I won the competition, yay! 😄 🏆 🎨
Timeline:
July 2022
The Background
In the years preceding my move to Global Payments, the design organisation had grown rapidly and was made up of over 150 designers by the end of 2021.
Recognising the need for a common purpose to unite the team and a set of design principles to guide us, the design leaders facilitated multiple workshops – inspired by Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle framework – to collaboratively articulate why we do what we do, and how we do it.
The output was a comprehensive 'Why' statement and a set of 9 design principles to drive our behaviours and help our decision making.
And so it was against this backdrop that the Design Ops leadership launched an internal competition to design a deck of playing cards to bring to life these Design Principles, with the chosen design to be printed and distributed worldwide to the entire design community within Global Payments.
PLAYING CARD DECK
Simplicity and Clarity
When the competition launched in July 2022 I was still quite new to Global Payments. I saw this as an opportunity to showcase some of my talents., but there was one initial problem – I had NONE of my usual design tools at my disposal! The only design software I had access to at this point was Figma.
So I reframed the problem in my head, and thought about how – if I simply kept to basic geometric shapes – it would be possible to design a proof of concept using only Figma.
Simplicity and clarity are the building blocks that are most essential to us as experience designers. But at the core of everything we do at Global Payments are our 9 design principles, and it is upon these foundational core principles that we lay those building blocks.
And so I began visualising these principles as pictograms, using simple geometric shapes to illustrate each of the 9 design concepts and depicting the principle sitting centrally at the core of each one.
But I really wanted these to work as a deck for an actual game of cards. So I created 9 suits with 1 picture card for each suit (the title of the Principle) and 4 numbered cards per suit. The numbered cards each feature the relevant pictogram in the corners of the card (just like a regular deck of playing cards) as well as further points elaborating on the Design Principle.
Click through the gallery below to view the 9 suits of playing cards:
I wanted these principles to be personal and inspire an emotional connection with our design community. For that reason I chose not to use the corporate Global Payments colours and instead created a bespoke colour palette to help add some individual personality.
For my submission to the competition, I added other visuals to try give further visual context to how these could work outside of just the playing cards deck.
Click through the gallery below to view examples of these:
ANIMATED VIDEO
Growing the visual language
The designs elicited a massively positive response, and I felt there was more that could be done to use this visual language to communicate these principles. And so I set myself the task of creating an animated video to tell the story of our design community and our design principles.
My first draft of the video was pretty basic – it simply began with Principle #1 and played through to Principle #9. I sought feedback from other team members and got great guidance and advice. The video needed to tell a story – in this initial form of the video, it was like: “9 Design Principles. So what?”.
So I went back and storyboarded a new introduction, setting the scene of 160+ designers in one community with one common purpose.
I took the white dot which is a common motif on all of the design principles, and played with it to create a more dynamic and engaging animated video.
FEARLESS FEEDBACK
A part of our design culture
With the positive reaction to the animated video, these design principles were beginning to take on a life of their own and becoming a systemic part of our design culture.
Fearless Feedback – an initiative of our Design Ops leadership – is a weekly session that provides a dedicated safe space for us as a team to share ideas and hone our feedback and critique skills.
The visual language I have created for the Design Principles has now become an integral part of these sessions, with a Design Ops rep assigning one of the Design Principles to the board at the start to help frame feedback.
So, for example, if they assign the Design Principle #1 playing card (ie. “Don’t stand out when you are born to fit in”), this might illicit a question along the lines of: “Have we considered our Index Design system here? It’s important that we keep some level of consistency.”
Or if they were to assign the Design Principle #4 playing card (ie. “We favour inclusion over exclusion”), this might inspire a team member to share feedback such as “Has the accessibility needs of the user been taken into account?” etc.
Click through the gallery below to view examples of these in use:
THE FUTURE
Global Payments Design Site
Design Operations recently launched an internal Design site with a library of resources for the entire community, and I am working with them on ways we can further incorporate the visual language of the Design Principles to continue communicating the why and how of what we do.