I’ve been thinking more about how I review a design – both my own and someone else’s. So over the past couple days I’ve been writing down every question I’ve been asking when I look at a design-in-progress. Some of these I say out loud, some just go through my head, some are in person, others are posted to Basecamp or Campfire.
These are in no particular order, and I don’t ask all of them every time.
- What does it say?
- What does it mean?
- Is what it says and what it means the same thing?
- Do we want that?
- Why do we need to say that here?
- If you stopped reading here, what’s the message?
- What’s the take away after 8 seconds?
- How does this make you feel?
- What’s down below?
- How else can we say this?
- What’s memorable about this?
- What’s that for?
- Who needs to know that?
- Who needs to see that?
- How does that change behavior?
- What’s the payoff?
- What does someone know now that they didn’t know before?
- How does that work?
- Why is that worth a click?
- Is that worth scrolling?
- What’s the simpler version of this?
- Are we assuming too much?
- Why that order?
- Why would this make them choose that?
- What does a more polished version of this look like?
- Why would someone leave at this point?
- What’s missing?
- Why are we saying this twice?
- Is it worth pulling attention away from that?
- Does that make it clearer?
- What’s the obvious next step?
- How would someone know that?
- Would it matter if someone missed that?
- Does that make it easier or harder?
- Would this be better as a sentence or a picture?
- Where’s the verb?
- Why is that there?
- What matters here?
- What would happen if we got rid of that?
- Why isn’t that clear?
- Why is this better?
- How can we make this more obvious?
- What happens when this expands?
- If we got rid of this, does that still work?
- Is it obvious what happens next?
- What just happened?
- Where’s the idea?
- What problem is that solving?
- How does this change someone’s mind?
- What makes this a must have?
Jason Fried wrote this on Oct 11 2011 There are 30 comments.
Alan 11 Oct 11
I think this is the answer for this post.
http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2011/why-arent-we-converting/
Dave S 11 Oct 11
Jason, thanks for the exhaustive design review list!
I understand you are a master at this now and most of it comes second nature to you. However, for us less sophisticated design types, could you recommend a small process to follow vs. doing it all once with all of these questions.
Perhaps – work on satisfying user needs, then simplifying, then perfecting the design layout and copy or …?
@ggwicz 11 Oct 11
It’d be interesting to see how you answered these questions with the new Highrise landing page compared to your answers for the old design.
Anonymous Coward 11 Oct 11
@JF
Most of the questions seem to be less about reviewing Design and more to deal with reviewing Copy.
True?
Thanasis Polychronakis 11 Oct 11
Wow, that is a large list indeed!
This is great raw material to form a solid design process!
Many of these questions should be clearly answered way before anyone touches his / her mouse…
Now, where was that brief?
Dylan Thomas 11 Oct 11
Jason, this is a great list, I use a similar process myself, thanks for writing it down and sharing it.
Dave S. – I think this piece that I wrote a few years ago about how to give a good critique may help, by filling in some of the blanks between these questions.
http://therail.info/2007/11/25/adschool-101-how-to-jumpstart-a-good-critique
JF 11 Oct 11
Most of the questions seem to be less about reviewing Design and more to deal with reviewing Copy.
Copywriting is design – I don’t separate the two. But deeper, everything communicates so while these questions sound like they may be targeting copy, they’re also targeting visuals, organization, and overall concept.
Nathaniel Mallet 11 Oct 11
This is fantastic, thanks for sharing. I do ask a few of the “big picture” questions on your list (Do we want that? Why is that there?, etc), but most I’ve never though of (Why that order? Is that worth scrolling? Would this be better as a sentence or a picture? etc).
Jonathan Moore 11 Oct 11
Great list! I usually ask myself the same questions, but one of the first I always ask is…
Does it have personality?
Steve R. 11 Oct 11
Every question Jason asks implies removing, clarifying or consolidating, rather than adding information, which should be no news to any reader of this blog. :)
I’m going to tack this one over my monitor and force myself to ask them, if only to make myself slow down and think.
jai 11 Oct 11
This list seems poorly designed, its just one big block of text, no categorization, i couldn’t bring myself to read through it.
i’m mostly joking to be an ass, but it is kinda a pain to skim
Lance Wiggs 11 Oct 11
The most important – and missing – question to me is “What do you want me (the user) to do?”
Mark 11 Oct 11
What I like about this list is that it doesn’t focus on “how the design looks” it focuses on what and how the design communicates a message. Sure looks are part of design, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle.
This is a great list. Thanks for sharing.
ryan 12 Oct 11
If anyone’s interested, I put this into a single-page bulleted .pdf file: http://cl.ly/2J0P3E0Z3l451N2s1i2T
John Furneaux 12 Oct 11
Assuming this blog post is copy, did you ask yourself those questions?
WobblyShop 12 Oct 11
Great list. I think we might add: Is it memorable?
Tony Kelsey 12 Oct 11
One question I always like to ask myself is - Is it intuitive. Intuitive design is so important when creating a simplified and effective user experience. Good list. I think I’ll borrow a few of those :)
Bryan 12 Oct 11
and a very basic question ‘do i like it’?
mirek 12 Oct 11
Nice list. I’m writting an application with two of my friends and almost all of these questions we’d asked ourselves during project and now during real desing.
For us the biggest question is always: is that really needed :)
Saeed Neamati 12 Oct 11
I think more questions mean that more chances are that you get away from a standard path, and get far from being realistic. In other words, I don’t think that for every design, you can remember those questions and ask them all, unless you write’em all down as a check-list. Also, other checkers might not be interested in asking all these questions on a design. So, I prefer to have a list of 5 to 10 items.
Foo 12 Oct 11
Foo
Darren 12 Oct 11
I like how each of these questions, or most of them, can be applied as wide or narrow as you want. The entire design and specific elements.
A few principle questions I’ve asked of late. Maybe more broad but lead to progress, revision, no doubt.
Is this different (innovative)? Is this honest? Referring to experience, assumptions usually. Is this useful? What can be removed? Is this clear enough? How long will this last? Can we try this later?
And the hardest sometimes… Is this finished?
ploogman 13 Oct 11
JF – wondered if you would comment on the design of something a little different, the 9-9-9 tax plan. Seems so much more simple than the tomes of tax code and bizarre forms we have now. What do you think of that design?
Malkio 15 Oct 11
I don’t think he ment for this to be an exhaustive list to be used for each project but I thin you could most surely apply the list to every project. and use those applicable. it would be wise to sit and categorize this list, and add said categories to your pre during and post design work flow.
@Malkio
Mark 15 Oct 11
Wow! Cut it down dude.
chirag 15 Oct 11
most of the questions are always there in your head…very few people can actually write them out…Great post!
Kathy Sierra 15 Oct 11
Wonderful list. Thank-you. And for phase two, the really hard part, take these, put them on a virtual EQ, and adjust the sliders for relative importance/weighting. Yes “it depends”, but in general, I know you know that some are more crucial than others. Or to put it another way, if someone put a gun to your head for forced you to pick, say, FIVE of these, which five would you choose?
We went through an exercise like that for our own list of questions (not design,, but similar), and it was both excruciating and enlightening. We wrote each of them on a post-it, put them on a big board, and just kept rearranging, re-ordering, categorizing, removing, adding back in, etc.
But out of this emerged a top priority we had not even consciously realized before that. Before that, we, too, had an “in no particular order” list of possible questions. Which worked for us but failed miserably when trying to scale the review process to other people. We didn’t realize the weighting deeply, deeply mattered since we subconsciously applied it ourselves. But trying to share this practice and related lessons with others was where we saw that some of what we imagined was obvious, implicit weighting appeared arbitrary to others.
Again, fantastic post and list.
SD 16 Oct 11
This is an awesome design checklist…..few of these points are excellent and totally new for me…thanks a lot.
Frazer Hennessey 17 Oct 11
You’ve massively over complicated it.
Legion of Velour 17 Oct 11
One would hope most of these questions could be best addressed with an exasperated, open-mouthed, “are you stupid?” stare. Very good comments!
This discussion is closed.