The most valuable outcome of a design review is to find design flaws or opportunities to simplify your system. Some design decisions are incredibly costly to change later, so it’s best to catch these mistakes as early as possible.
Summary
- An effective design review capitalizes on the work you invested in your design document and expands its benefits.
- Structure your design document so that early sections are intelligible to any reader you expect to see your doc.
- Use tools like Google Docs or Office 365 to make it easy for reviewers to leave you comments as they read your doc.
- Work hard to create clear diagrams, as they’re the most effective way to communicate your design to reviewers.
- Give your reviewers time to read your design doc asynchronously so they can review it with their full attention.
- Work through major issues with a single reviewer before sharing the doc with the full team.
- Treat every question or misunderstanding as an opportunity to improve your design doc and eliminate the confusion for future readers.
- Quickly resolve comment threads, and integrate the outcome of the discussion into the doc itself.
- Use a dedicated meeting to resolve any contentious issues you can’t resolve through text-based discussion.
- After you implement your design, look for opportunities to improve your design process based on the project’s outcome.