We're a product team of 6, in a company of 20 people. We've tried to implement design-review to be like code-review, but we're having limited success. We've talked about:
- Reviewing "every line" of a design
- Assigning designs to named reviewers, who should request changes, and then approve
- A checklist of criteria the design must meet
Problems we've hit:
- Design review is missed entirely before coding starts.
- Reviewer barely scratches the surface, and misses huge issues
- Most tickets/designs don't say whether review was passed or not
How do you handle this at your company? What tools/processes do you use?
To explain our process: We have a single designer, and when designs are reviewed it's usually by one of the devs
In the past we've done wireframes (Sketch) and interactive prototypes (InVision) We were frustrated that: 1. Lots of issues didn't surface until we started coding, when a raft of problems/edgecases would appear. 2. It was too easy to ignore existing UI components/css, so that each design featured new component styles and css.
For approx the last month our designer branches from `master` and hacks on top of that to create designs. He then creates a PR for design-review, alongside a spec with some screenshots in Dropbox Paper. Some advantages of this: 1. We get visual diffs from Percy, so we can see what's changed easily 2. We get versioning more easily built into designs (via git)
Then just before development we'll break a story down into tasks / subtasks and log those into JIRA for development. We have trouble with: 1. Letting the designer make changes once the subtasks are created and development has started (devs sometimes chasing a 'moving-target' spec) 2. Design not knowing the current state of development