UX Project Checklist — Why I made it and what’s next
If you’re into UX/UI/Product/WhateverIsCalledToday design, product management or tech in general, you might have stumbled across this useful and pretty website:
Hi! Nice to meet you 👋 I’m Andrea, the creator of the UX Project Checklist.
Just introducing myself again because if you are among the first who found this page, a long time has passed so you might have forgotten about us! #sad
In fact, I’ve built the UX Project Checklist almost 4 years ago.
The one-page website pretty much never changed as I’ve been busy (or lazy, or both) doing something else.
But this is about to change, maybe.
How it started
I’ve created the UX Project Checklist while I was working at Moonpig (if you’re British you know). During that time we were going through some slow paced product development and the dev backlog was already long enough for us designers to add on top of it, so, as UX team, Ed and I took the chance to invest in improving our process and how we were working within the Product Team (PO, UI, UX and Frontend dev too).
We experimented with new tools, physical boards and new processes. During this period of experimentation, I took some time to think of a way to help us keeping track of what we wanted to go through with every single project.
Before that, we had already done a good work establishing high-level processes across the company and the UX maturity was good. We had just refreshed our personas, defined our UI style guide and have some rough user journey map. The process in general was good, we were prototyping a lot, and testing with users regularly. What I felt was missing was a bit of order and more visibility of where every single project was at and what had to happen next.
The List
So here I was, researching articles and going through all my bookmarks to write down a simplified enough — but not too much — list of UX (or design in general) methods and methodologies, activities and tools that I found myself using the most in the past or that I thought we should have introduced from now on.
Yeah nice, but why the heck only 3 items per line?!
Good question!
Well, while I was writing all this stuff down I thought I wanted it to look practical, simple and accessible. Also, even tho the original format was paper (for our physical Design board), I thought I could have made a digital version of it, a bit for fun a bit for convenience and why not, share it around! Maybe someone else would have appreciated the effort. #SharingIsCaring!
It turned out, the final simplification wasn’t that far from our actual needs. Of course, the “Test” box (for example) could mean sooo many different things. But:
the goal was just to get our team to *think* about each step, the actions following was for us to decide
We could even decide not to take action on one of these steps! Each box is just a trigger to help a design/product team, in a company with a decent UX maturity, to go through several projects while following a process.
The outcome
Thanks to that final presentation the page was much more attractive!
In fact, few days after publishing it online, the page got noticed by someone, who posted it on ProductHunt making it #4 Product of the Day and on top of UX design tools lists (ever) and from there it spread around and got attention by various publications and apparently used a lot for educational purposes (like, uh… Harvard! There must be a mistake here tho).
For us has been an interesting tool to experiment with, unfortunately I left Moonpig shortly after that (you know how they say, fame gets to your head!) so we played with that just for a short time, then as I said, life happened, and I did other stuff!
Every design team has its own process, and every process is there to evolve, so I’m not sure how practical is the UX Project Checklist for most of the people or teams working in design.
But I’m might gonna find that out soon!
So, what’s next?
What is this about? Why am I writing this only now? Is just to tell you there’s more to come, and I’m gonna tell you why I’m writing about it here soon, so…
stay tuned 📺
give me a clap 👏
follow me here on Medium ✍️
and or on Twitter 🐦
and if you have any comment on this story or on the UX Project Checklist itself just comment below or reach out to me anywhere!
Read what happened next!
Peace ✌️
