Design review rules

I run about three design reviews a month. After the first dozen I noticed that the good ones had things in common, and the bad ones were bad in the same two or three ways. These are the rules I now write at the top of every review invite.

The rules

1. Send the work 24 hours before. Nobody forms a useful opinion in the first ninety seconds of seeing a screen.
2. Say what stage the work is at. “Exploring” and “about to ship” get different feedback, and people cannot guess which one it is.
3. One person talks first, and it is not the author.
4. Feedback is about the problem the design is solving, not the pixels it happens to use.
5. Every review ends with a named owner for each open question.
6. Nobody gets to say “just” in a review. “Just move it up” has never been a small request.

Why the order matters

Rule 3 took me longest to learn. When I present first and then ask “thoughts?”, the senior person in the room speaks, everyone else nods, and I leave with one opinion dressed as a consensus. When Tomás reads the work back in his own words before anyone else comments, the quiet people have something concrete to push against.¹

A review is for finding out what the work does to someone who has not seen it before.

I keep that line pinned above my desk. It reminds me that my own understanding of the screen is useless data at that point.

What I still get wrong

I over-explain at the start. Priya told me last month that my intro took eleven minutes and the actual feedback took nine. I now set a timer for three minutes and stop when it rings, mid-sentence if needed.

For the meeting itself I use the template I keep in a plain text file, and I will not start without it.

Footnotes

1. Tomás Ferreira joined the team in 2023 and does this better than anyone I have worked with. He keeps the readback to four sentences. ↩