How We Improved the Design Review Process and Reduced Errors by Three Times

While working on interfaces, we noticed that we kept fixing the same layout errors over and over again. This consumed time and resources. The solution was obvious—optimizing the design review process. That’s how we introduced checklists, which helped reduce the number of revisions by three times and significantly increased the speed of feature releases.

How We Work with Design

Our design workflow consists of several key stages:

• Idea Generation: The initiative may come from a product manager or a designer. We discuss the necessary resources and goals.
• Prototyping: We create the first draft, refine it with the product team, and then finalize it using our design system.
• Team Grooming: We ensure that everyone is aligned before proceeding to avoid rework later.
• Editing: The mockups go through editorial review for final text adjustments.
• Design Review: The team provides feedback by leaving comments. Sometimes, we hop on calls to discuss specific details.
• Final Grooming: We break down the design into implementation phases and coordinate the workflow between backend, frontend, and release teams.
• Development: The finalized design is handed off to developers, and we assist with any clarifications.
• Testing: QA engineers verify the feature and fix any detected bugs.
• Final Design Review: We compare the implemented version with the original design and fix inconsistencies.

How We Conduct Design Reviews

During the review, we focus on key aspects:

✔ Spacing and margins
✔ Fonts, text, and sizing
✔ Animations and interactive elements
✔ User flow and experience

All issues and comments are documented in Jira: we take screenshots, highlight inconsistencies, and describe the problem along with the necessary fixes.

Challenges of Manual Design Review

• Time-consuming process
• Hard to predict when a task will be ready for review
• Frequent context switching disrupts focus

How We Optimized the Process

The main issue was that the same mistakes kept occurring. We identified the most common ones:

❌ Incorrect spacing and margins
❌ Font-related issues (size, weight, kerning)
❌ Layout inconsistencies (page width, element sizes)
❌ Incorrect icon sizes or states
❌ Colors deviating from the original design

Less frequent but still critical issues:

⚠️ Outdated or deprecated components
⚠️ Custom-made elements instead of using UI-kit components
⚠️ Broken links or incorrect button behavior
⚠️ Animations not working as intended

To address these problems, we implemented checklists and trained developers to work in Figma.

What We Changed

✅ Developers now verify designs before submitting them
✅ Checklists are embedded into every frontend task
✅ Minor fixes are tracked as separate subtasks

Results

🔥 The number of errors dropped from 5–10 per task to just 2–3
🔥 Review time significantly decreased
🔥 The overall design review process became three times faster
🔥 The quality of UI implementation improved

What’s Next?

We see great potential in automating this process:

• Auto-verification based on checklists — a task cannot move forward unless all checklist items are completed
• AI-powered design reviews — we already have some ideas, but we’ll keep them under wraps for now 😉

Conclusion

Checklists have proven to be highly effective. They help developers avoid common mistakes and allow us to release new features faster and with higher quality.