✅ A light checklist for product designers

This quick checklist helps you avoid classic mistakes when designing a new feature

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Information architecture

Did you map out all the concepts, objects, structures, their properties, action they can perform or receive, and the relationships them? Have you share this modeling with your engineers? Does your design reflect the information architecture?

Stock

Did you seek how the design will impact the existing product? List the key user journeys impacted by the problem.

Real data

Did you fill your design with data from the real world? See if the data exists, and what kind of values it actually takes. Make sure the design works with 0 data or a lot of it.

Error cases

All possible error cases must be handled explicitly. What happens if the user makes a mistake?

Language

Make sure the design uses language that the users understand. Remove every word that is not important.

Accessibility

Is contrast enough? Does the interface work for colorblind people? What type of devices will the design support? Does is match your users?

Access rules

What kind of users can see what?

Response times

Did you take care of interactions? All interactions must have the best type of feedback for their response time. Discuss with the engineers to agree on a maximum response time.

Lots of Feedback

Did you receive all the feedback you could get? Make sure to seek and get feedback early and often, from peer designers, other product people, a decider on the impacted business metric, engineers, the customer support team… . Are you afraid of the feedback someone might give? Go and ask them.

Business Value

Beware of scope creep. Does each item in the solution contribute significantly to the original objective? Did you get carried away?

Analytics

How will you check how the feature is used and how is performs?

Launch strategy

How is the feature going to be distributed? What is needed for it to really be used?

Regulations

Are you collecting new data regulated by GDPR? Did you check the legal implications of the feature?