5X Your Design Outcomes: The Incredible Tool that isn’t an App


I’ve been testing a tool that we’ve been calling the Plus/Delta (P/D) method in my design lab. The P/D method has become a force multiplier on my design team by ~5-x’ing the design outcomes.

I’ll start with a quick story. The idea for the P/D method was spawned by a Sr. designer on my team, Aaron Wade, who got a bit frustrated with going through multiple rounds of design rejection in the early prototyping stages of a project. He is a great designer but he couldn’t put a finger on why he kept missing the mark.

One night he decided to take the initiative (a lost word on many folks) to figure a few things out. He figured out that he wasn’t thinking about big picture design implications clearly, his experimentation lent itself to great visual but not always great UX design, ultimately he didn’t feel like he was thinking it all through. So, the next morning he came back to me with new designs, this time with a long essay onwhy he designed what he designed, including the research he did, the samples he used as inspiration, notes on what he liked about the design and what he didn’t like… I’d never seen anything like it.

That multi-page essay inspired me to make his effort scale onto one page. Could we make it so every prototype was this thought through? Enter the Plus/Delta method. My team took Wade’s effort and put it into a format that fits a single page, here’s how it works…


For the Designer:

  1. At the top of the page, name your prototype (App Settings v2, On-boarding: Create Account v13, etc.)
  2. Write down a brief one to two sentence description of the design.
  3. Post the design.
  4. Under the design, in a two column list, put down what you think are strengths of the design in the “Plus” section and then put down what you think are considerations for change OR opportunities to try something new in the next round of prototyping in the “Delta” column.

Putting this together takes all of ten minutes. Designers will likely find the “Plus” section a lot easier to fill out than the “Delta” and that’s because you’ll probably treat “Delta” incorrectly as weaknesses at first. Weaknesses are difficult to spot in your own design so the effort is futile. We’re calling it Plus/Delta and not Plus/Minus for a reason — we don’t want to focus on the bad, we want to use the weaker parts of the design to focus on opportunities for change in the next round.


For the Design Leader:

  1. Make sure your designers send you their P/D document well before a product meeting.
  2. Use the designer’s P/D document as an opportunity to understand their thinking as opposed to just going with your gut.
  3. Make your own P/D list on the design so that you can be additive to the process. It helps your designer understand the components of the product youthink are important.
  4. Make it a habit for your designers to always submit a P/D document with every new prototype. If a P/D document isn’t submitted, hold off the design review until it is.

We’ve been using the P/D method to sharpen our early stage product design thinking. With every round of prototypes the designers email the entire team their P/D document a few hours before we are set to run a meeting. I review all the prototypes before our meetings and it allows me to be hyper-focused and clearduring the meetings on where the team should move the design to next. Better yet, this method gives me a template into my designer’s mind and it allows me to really understand how they think. This means I can help them evolve their thinking into areas they aren’t so well versed in yet and they can do the same to me!

I’ve worked with design leaders who say things like “I don’t know, its just not good enough, try again” and “just put a bow on it, it has to get done” or “I don’t love it, it isn’t simple enough” — If you are a designer, you hate that feedback, I know you are nodding your head “yes” right now. That kind of feedback is cryptic and useless, it shows a lack of articulated vision on the part of the leader. Use the P/D as a way to be less cryptic and more clear.


The Outcomes on my Team:

  1. Literally every round of prototypes are well thought through.
  2. Everyone gets a say on a design’s P/D list which means everyone gets heard.
  3. Designers think about design implications well before they ever get to the P/D document now, which means they are constantly thinking their designs through.
  4. Designers trust each other to be honest and know that everyone’s feedback is thought through and not just a gut feeling.
  5. There’s always team consensus on where the design should move to next based on the P/D list.
  6. Designers expect that no design is final and a lot will change quickly but the evolution of the product based on the notes of the “Delta” is eye opening.
  7. We all WANT to see the P/D in early prototype stages now because we use it be objective about the product.


A big thank you to Aaron Wade for inspiring this methodology and Aaron and Aviv Grill for proof reading this post.


P.S. As an experiment, ask your designers to fill out the “Plus” section of the P/D document before they ever start their design. That list will now serve as a north star for their design because they’ll want to check as many of those boxes as possible WHILE designing. It’s cool!