Whether it’s live or remote, synchronous or not, a design review makes sure your carefully envisioned designs make it to implementation safely. We take you through the process and share tips on how to make the most of them. 

As a designer, you hand off your work to the development team, and they move on to implementing your designs. Can you close Figma and call it a day? Not if you want to make sure what you’ve created is executed correctly and meets the outlined requirements and specifications. 

This is where a design implementation review comes in. 

Design implementation reviews, or just design reviews in short, help bridge the gap between designers, developers, and software testers by keeping everyone on the same page. Essential to the design process, they help ensure your carefully envisioned designs are implemented precisely as they should be.

A design implementation review evaluates the current state of a project’s implementation and is usually performed at the beginning of the development process.

Moreover, it is far more cost-effective to make changes early on than once the product has already been built or has reached an advanced stage of development. Not to mention, reviews and feedback at any stage of the digital product development process are both useful and important for the product’s success.

At Infinum, we build a wide range of digital products, including IoT, banking, and telecom apps, as well as complex websites and management systems. Talking to my designer colleagues about the design review processes we use on our projects, I learned that while there are some similarities, we approach certain things differently. 

We concluded that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to design implementation reviews and that the process you use should be adapted to the specific needs of your project. Based on our experiences, however, we identified some best practices that have proven to be effective.

The frequency of design implementation reviews can vary depending on the project’s complexity, timeline, and the team’s workflow. 

Employing regular check-ins throughout the design and development process is good practice. They can be scheduled based on project milestones, e.g., following the initial design phase, after some specific features are developed, or when new components are completed.

In Agile development methodologies like Scrum, design implementation reviews are often integrated into the sprint cycles. Designers, developers, and software testers typically get together to conduct a design implementation review at the end of each sprint. They can also be integrated into individual user stories or incorporated as part of the Definition of Done (DoD) for specific frontend tasks.

As the name says, synchronous design implementation reviews are those where everyone involved is present at the same time. The project’s designer, developer (at least one per platform), and software tester get together and pull the latest build to compare it against the design documented in Figma. 

Back in the pre-pandemic days, live reviews at the office were the usual way of going about it. Nowadays, everybody has grown accustomed to remote reviews over Zoom or Google Meet. However, whether they’re taking place live or remotely, the jist is the same – designers or developers walk everyone through the design or demonstrate how it’s being implemented. 

Just like everything in life, synchronous design reviews come with several advantages and disadvantages, depending on how they are conducted and the specific context of the project.

Pro-tip for synchronous design reviews: Regardless of whether reviews are conducted live or remotely, it is good practice to determine who is responsible for taking notes during the meeting. This ensures that nothing important is missed and makes it easier to assign tasks for development fixes after the meeting.

There are times when scheduling live or remote reviews can be a hassle. Asynchronous design implementation reviews offer a way to review and give feedback on a design or its implementation without everyone having to be available at the same time. This can be especially convenient for distributed teams across different time zones or when stakeholders need more time for a comprehensive evaluation.

Providing or receiving feedback in your own time, at your own pace, sounds a lot less scary than doing it in real time. That is part of the reason why this approach is commonly used not only with fully remote teams but also with hybrid ones. However, there are some disadvantages to keep in mind as well.

Having gone through all the pros and cons, we should note that there is no right or wrong way of going about design implementation reviews – it’s best to adapt the process based on the project’s requirements. For some features, live and remote reviews work better, while for others, we are able to review the implementation thoroughly working asynchronously.

To help make your async reviews more efficient, collaborative, and conducive to producing better outcomes, I’ll share the practices we’ve identified as useful through our years of experience in project work. 

A common method employed for asynchronous reviews is for designers to compare implementation screenshots with the original designs from their preferred design tool, such as Figma or Sketch. Here are a couple of general tips that will help you on your way:

Further, when we do reviews, we find it best to categorize issues and fixes into three groups: things that must be fixed, things that should be fixed, and “nice-to-haves”. This categorization helps developers prioritize tasks and fix critical issues first.

Make sure to document all the necessary changes with as much detail and clarity as possible so developers can understand exactly what needs to be improved. Your design review documentation can include notes next to the screenshots you have taken, as well as more detailed information in the appropriate place.