Systematize quality assurance by tracking essential tasks, standards, and milestones throughout the design process.
Build a Designer Checklist to track critical tasks, maintain quality standards, and ensure nothing is missed across every phase of your project.
A Designer Checklist is a structured reference tool that outlines essential tasks, quality standards, and review criteria for each phase of a design project. UX designers, visual designers, and design managers use it to ensure that critical steps are not skipped, standards are maintained, and deliverables are complete before moving to the next phase. Unlike ad-hoc to-do lists, a well-crafted Designer Checklist is reusable across projects and evolves as the team learns from past oversights. The checklist typically covers areas such as user research completeness, accessibility compliance, design system adherence, responsive behavior, content readiness, and handoff documentation. It is particularly valuable on large projects with multiple contributors, where consistent quality depends on shared expectations rather than individual memory. Teams that adopt checklists report fewer last-minute surprises during development handoff, better alignment between design and engineering, and more thorough accessibility and usability coverage. The checklist also serves as a communication tool for stakeholders, providing visibility into what has been completed and what remains, building confidence that the design process is rigorous and comprehensive.
Before starting the designer checklist, gather the project requirements and understand the goals of the product or service. This helps in creating a more targeted and efficient checklist.
Identify the target users of the product or service, as well as their needs, expectations, and preferences. Understand the context in which they will be using the product or service.
List the key functionalities of the product or service, as well as any additional features that contribute to a positive user experience.
Based on project goals, target users, context, and key functionalities, create a customized checklist of design elements, principles, and guidelines that should be considered throughout the design process.
Prioritize the items on the checklist to focus on those aspects that are most crucial to achieving the project goals, satisfying user needs, and accomplishing desired user experiences.
Involve a team of professionals from different areas, such as designers, developers, content creators, and project managers, to gather diverse perspectives and insights while working through the checklist.
Throughout the design process, use the designer checklist to ensure that key principles, guidelines, and user needs are being met. Conduct regular reviews and seek feedback from internal and external stakeholders.
At various stages of the design process, conduct usability testing to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the design, as well as overall user satisfaction. Use the findings to refine and improve the design.
As the project evolves and new insights emerge from feedback, testing, and design iterations, update and refine the designer checklist to maintain its relevance and usefulness.
Finally, document the checklist, its evolution, and the lessons learned throughout the project. This documentation will contribute to the design team's knowledge base and also help future projects with similar goals or challenges.
After creating and using a Designer Checklist, your team will have a reliable quality assurance framework that catches common oversights before they become costly problems. Each project phase will have clear completion criteria, and team members will share a common understanding of what 'done' means for design deliverables. The checklist serves as living documentation that improves with each project, capturing lessons learned and evolving best practices. Stakeholders gain visibility into design progress, and development handoffs become smoother because both teams reference the same completion criteria. Over time, the checklist reduces the cognitive load on individual designers by externalizing the mental list of things to remember.
If you prefer online checklists, convert the checklist to an online format to keep it always at hand on any device.
Customize the checklist for each project type rather than using a single generic list for everything.
Review and update your checklist after each project based on lessons learned and new edge cases discovered.
Include both 'must-have' items and 'nice-to-have' items with clear visual distinctions between them.
Add links to resources, templates, or examples for each checklist item so teammates can self-serve.
Create project-type specific variations for mobile apps, websites, SaaS dashboards, and design systems.
Share checklists with stakeholders to set expectations and demonstrate the thoroughness of your process.
Reward yourself for completing items - small motivational cues help maintain diligence through long projects.
A stale checklist that is never revised based on project learnings becomes irrelevant. Schedule a brief retrospective after each project to add missing items and remove obsolete ones.
An exhaustive checklist with hundreds of items overwhelms users and gets ignored. Keep it focused on the items that actually prevent mistakes, and archive rarely-needed items into an appendix.
A one-size-fits-all checklist fails to address project-specific needs. Maintain a core template but customize it for each project type, whether it is a mobile app, marketing site, or enterprise dashboard.
When people check items without actually verifying them, the checklist provides false confidence. Pair each item with a brief verification step or evidence requirement to ensure genuine quality checks.
Document outlining goals, objectives, audience, and key performance indicators.
Fictional user profiles with demographics, goals, motivations, and frustrations.
Analysis of competitor strengths, weaknesses, and differentiation opportunities.
Concise descriptions of user goals, actions, and expected outcomes.
Step-by-step illustration of user paths to identify pain points.
Low-fidelity sketches or mockups showing layout, hierarchy, and key elements.
Evaluation of design effectiveness through real user testing and feedback.
Polished interactive version integrating usability and stakeholder feedback.
Evaluation of design compliance with accessibility guidelines and standards.
Reusable design guidelines, components, and patterns for consistency at scale.
Review of user feedback, usage metrics, and KPI impact after launch.