My Design Quality Checklist
May 2021
What does it mean for a design to be "high quality"? These are some questions I ask myself when evaluating work.
Does anybody want this?
- Does this solve a business problem?
- Does this solve a user problem?
Does it follow established patterns?
- Within the current product (eg. Slack)
- Within modern UI design
- Are we using the appropriate patterns
Does this account for edge cases?
- Different screen size
- Malformed data
- Long and short strings
- Null states
UX design
- Is the user's flow through the UI considered and accommodated?
- Is the action close to the text (Fitt's Law)
- Does this task have a clear and consistent visual flow?
- Is the main action explicit?
- Are any opportunities for delight taken or considered?
Is it accessible?
- Are color contrast ratios hit?
- Don't only use color to signify importance
- Proper aria labels
- Semantic markup
Visual design
- Gestalt principles
- Are they considered and leveraged?
- Is there enough hierarchy?
- Is the most important thing highlighted?
- Are font sizes and weights appropriate?
- Does the spacing feel appropriate
- Are the right groupings created?
- Is it consistent
- Is it "on brand"?
- Does it feel modern?
- Are we using the right icon? Does it add value?
- Gestalt principles
Implementation
- Did the engineers build it right?
- Are transition states considered? Loading?