Design Team Organized an Event to Foster Maximizing Synergy within the Team
Hello, we are PayPay Product Design Team. In October 2024, our team held an event with the primary goal of enhancing the synergy among members, focusing mainly on the design team. During the event, designers from the product department shared their work styles and philosophies, creating an opportunity to foster synergy with members from other teams within the company who we don’t often have a chance to engage with.
Q&A with the Design Team
At first, we responded to questions received through a pre-event survey. Here are a few highlights:
Q: What design process do you follow to create designs from scratch?
Broadly speaking, PayPay’s product designers adhere to the following process:
- Idea: Conceive ideas congruent with the project’s objectives.
- Research: Conduct research, including data analysis and user interviews.
- Draft Design: Develop a draft design informed by the research findings.
- Review: Get design feedback from product managers, the design team, and other stakeholders.
- Finalize Design: Refine the design, incorporating feedback from the reviews.
- Wording Check: Perform UX writing checks to polish the copy for optimal clarity.
- Handover: Perform final checks with the product manager, then handover to the engineering team.
Q: How do you approach the creation of UI elements?
When crafting new UI elements, our approach includes the following steps:
- Research: Understand user needs and evaluate the potential impact of the new UI.
- Design System Check: Verify with the design system team to ensure consistency with the existing design system.
- Design Review: Evaluate designs with the design team and other stakeholders to determine optimal UI designs.
In the initial two years post-launch, we prioritized rapid release cycles, resulting in a streamlined process where development would immediately start once the design was over. However, as our user base expanded, we established mandatory steps like research, design reviews, and UX writing checks to enhance our design quality.
Q: How do you ensure consistent design when multiple designers are involved? Do you have a system similar to pull requests?
We have guidelines for both our design system and wording. By adhering to these instructions, our designers, irrespective of which project they are involved in, can deliver designs and copy that are consistent across the board.
While we don’t have a pull request-like system, we created a framework for design reviews, where designs undergo peer evaluation to determine their appropriateness. Feedback from our expert peers is extremely insightful and helps us make solid progress in design work.
Q: How do you decide on which design to use?
There are various decision-making processes, but we emphasize user-centric design approaches, integrating results from user research, interviews, and testing. Specific methods are chosen based on the scale of the project, available bandwidth, and timeline.
Casual Talk
After the Q&A session, we formed four groups, each with an equal mix of designers and members of other teams, in a relaxing environment where they could chat over tea and snacks. This setting allowed for engaging conversations transcending team boundaries, deepening understanding through interactions with engineers and PMs, discussions about design work, knowledge sharing, and even talking about hobbies, fostering a richer sense of camaraderie. We hope that by holding events and exchanges like these regularly, we can facilitate the appreciation of designers’ roles among cross-functional teams, improving communication and expediting our workflow.
At the end, we collected feedback from attendees, which were kind and positive, such as “I was able to learn more about the design team” and “They are a friendly and enjoyable bunch.”
In Closing
Thank you for reading until the end of this event report. Looking ahead, we hope to host more events and share articles on diverse themes related to the PayPay Design Team. If our work piques your interest, please consider joining us at PayPay!
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*Job openings and employee affiliations are current as of the time of the interview.