Conducting Design Reviews

The goal of design-review sessions is to gather feedback from the stakeholders and approvers on the visual designs. These sessions should be scheduled well in advance so that all participants have a chance to review the designs and provide full attention to the review process.

There are three types of design meetings that you should schedule. The first meeting type is called a peer review. This is a review of the design with other designers that can provide constructive feedback that strengthens the design. The second type of review is the technical review. You need to make sure that the development or technical team is on board with the design direction and what is achievable within the scope of your project. The third meeting type is the client review or stakeholder review. Within these sessions you will gather feedback on what they like and what needs improvement. The ultimate goal is to get sign-off so that the design is ready to be built. It can be tricky to identify who should be in each one of these meetings and how long you should meet for.

What to Include

With all design reviews it is important that you show only the designs that you feel are the strongest. There might be some cases that you have some back-pocket designs or concepts. Most peer reviews are ad-hoc and normally do not require much preparation. It could be as simple as asking your design colleagues to come look at your screen or print-outs and provide instant feedback. In the technical review sessions it is a good idea to have predefined elements that you want to cover. The developers aren't there to provide usability or design direction—only whether it's technically feasible—so you need to make sure you specify which elements the developer should be focusing on. For the design stakeholder meetings the presentation should be well organized and to the point, with a section for feedback and next steps. If you feel strongly about going in a particular design direction you might want to save that for the last slide that you review. This will keep the design fresh in their minds and, more often than not, people react to things that they have seen most recently. If you are showcasing multiple design options, include a summary slide that shows all of the design options in one screen, so that participants can clearly react to all options without having to scroll back through your deck.

How to Organize

PowerPoint is one of the easiest applications to use to prepare your designs for review. The tool lets you easily swap out screens and build the context around the design concepts. The designs can be easily exported into a non-editable PDF for sharing before or after the meeting. I would advise against sharing the design deck with the stakeholders too far in advance of the meeting, as that would spoil the big “reveal.” For users who are attending remotely, you might need to send the deck through email or upload it to a SharePoint site. Keep it simple and don't provide too many blocks of heavy text. If you spend over one minute per slide you will need to trim it down. The structure of the presentation should include the following:

• Introduction/purpose: This section of the presentation covers the necessary details about who you are, what this meeting is about, any ground rules (like cell-phone use and checking of emails during the meeting), and the overall goal of the meeting.
• Agenda: This is a standard slide that you will briefly cover that identifies what is going to be covered in the session.
• Design comps: This is the meat and potatoes of the presentation. It includes all of the design compositions that you have created and any variations on the design. You might want to provide a teaser slide for each design, and then talk about its characteristics.
• Overview: The overview showcases all of the design options in a single slide.
• Q&A: Make sure to save time at the end for any questions that may come up.
• Next steps: Clearly identify the next action steps—whether it's a sign off, request for feedback, or something else.

Who Should Attend

You shouldn't have more than 10 people at a design-review session. The more people involved, the harder it is to get a consensus on a particular design direction. In larger groups some people might not speak up for fear of being criticized by their peers. In most cases there are no stupid questions, and all feedback is welcome. As the designer you just have to decide what feedback you will use to make the design better. The stakeholders in the room should be the ones signing off on the design. The internal marketing group is usually the most important set of attendees. The stakeholders will be looking to them for advice on what is within the corporate standards and how much flexibility you have with the design.