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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.

  1. Does anybody want this?

    • Does this solve a business problem?
    • Does this solve a user problem?

  2. Does it follow established patterns?

    • Within the current product (eg. Slack)
    • Within modern UI design
    • Are we using the appropriate patterns

  3. Does this account for edge cases?

    • Different screen size
    • Malformed data
    • Long and short strings
    • Null states

  4. 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?

  5. Is it accessible?

    • Are color contrast ratios hit?
    • Don't only use color to signify importance
    • Proper aria labels
    • Semantic markup

  6. 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?

  7. Implementation

    • Did the engineers build it right?
    • Are transition states considered? Loading?