The Powerful Ritual of Daily Design Reviews

Even though I expected it, I was stunned when I turned the corner and saw it. Along one wall of the 20-foot-long corridor we’d just entered, there were rows and rows of crudely attached screenshots.

Each screenshot was a screen from the project’s large enterprise application. Each row was a sequence of screens the user would experience.

Screens were taped on top of other screens. Every time a screen was updated, the developer would tape it on top of the previous version. Some screens had been updated 10 or 20 times, and the paper stack fluttered as people walked by.

The corridor was visually stunning. It was a living description of what it was like to use the large, complex application.

The daily design review meeting.

The screenshot corridor was a by-product of a daily design review meeting. One-by-one, as the meeting convened, the project’s front-end developers would approach the wall. They’d scan it to find the pile of older versions of the screen they’d been working on.

Once they find it, they’d tape up today’s version right on top. Then they’d look around to review what the other front-end developers had just added to the wall.