How I Make Design Review Part of the Development Process

o me, XD Review is an important part of the development process. I’m not just saying that because I’m a designer. It matters because design review needs to happen at the right time, when it’s actually part of the work, not treated like a polish item that gets pushed into the backlog.

Every team works differently, but this is a process that worked really well for me on projects at Bottle Rocket.

The biggest improvement was moving XD Review earlier. Instead of waiting until development and QA were basically done, I reviewed work while the developer was still actively working on the ticket.

That made everything easier.

On one project, XD Review used to happen after QA. If I found something that needed to change, the developer would update it and QA would have to review it again. It added another loop to the process and made design feedback feel like something that happened after the work was already finished.

Once we added a dedicated XD Review step, things moved much faster. I could catch issues while the ticket was still fresh, and developers could make changes before they had mentally moved on to something else.

It also helped me catch more. Reviewing one ticket at a time is a lot easier than trying to go through an entire app and remember every detail.