What is the concept of a Design Review Committee?
Our Clients rely on Cubix for user interaction details, crafting trendy and engaging experiences, and push dots to boldly go where they’ve never gone before.
In the past every project always seemed to receive some comments, whether it came from an individual team member or groups, each time the feedback was directed towards improving user experience, swapping design elements, layout, and flow of the product. When I noticed this cycle early this year, I decided to put together a group of creative individuals that included graphic artists, designers, app/game junkies, product strategists, business analysts&QA lead and named this creative group as the Design Review Committee (DRC).
Mandate
Conduct a thorough and in-depth review of wireframes, designs & non-functional requirements for inclusion of mandatory features, options and standard features as per the scope of the project.
Suggest clear and precise feedback, improvement’s & changes, formally to the authority submitting artifacts for review.
Have developers feedback included in the wireframes, designs & non-functional requirements.
The DRC keeps track of submitted designs, their review statuses and decisions in a specified format.
Observe and track latest trends and ensure that the design elements are in-line with what’s trending.
Develop, release and maintain Design Guidelines Standards for whole company.
Responsibilities
The DRC is fully mandated to approve, reject or conditionally approve the following deliverables/artifacts related to all projects undertaken by Cubix:
Wireframes
User experience as per target audience and market
Logos, Themes & Designs etc.
Graphics, Images, Icons etc.
Alpha / Non-Functional Builds
Functional Builds
The designs rejected by DRC would be supported with clear and precise reasoning for rejection and with formal feedback or list of suggestions/changes required.
The designs conditionally approved would be supported with conditions and exceptions given on those conditions for e.g. client/customers’ preference/requirement.
How it works
DRC meeting quorum comprises of permanent members (Permanent members of DRC as stated above) and project specific members (the members who are the key owners of the project under review). The DRC responds back with an initial review to the Project Manager/Owner who has submitted designs to DRC within 48-72 hours. With the current work load, this meeting is conducted 3 times per week. Most of the times and primarily based on my availability, I chair and lead this meeting to ensure that every sprint goes through the DRC before being sent out to our clients, so they receive a much more polished and well-cooked build for review.
Importance of DRC for our clients
Design updates and information every step of a project right from inception. Our DRC team is trained to advocate for users, to ensure that the users never lose their interest, needs and can perform desired actions faster than industry benchmarks. They make sure that the product being built is the one that’s most valuable to users. DRC is involved from market research to user interviews, to execution, verifying design standards, testing, and documentation. When our user advocacy is constantly and consistently intertwined with engineers’ impeccable tech know-how and the business development team’s market wisdom — that’s where a sustainable, meaningful product is born.
And that’s exactly what the DRC does for our clients.
These are the kind of issues the DRC is tackling — how we might make it easier to compare products on mobile screens? How we let users order a food in 5 seconds from our food delivery app.? How can we help users navigate chaotic content? It’s difficult to work. There are use cases and personas we’ve never had to think about before. It forces the DRC to empathize with people facing different problems, with different needs, blocked by a different obstacle and at the end of the day, those broadened conceptions make us the leading company in the Florida, area and one of the most innovative development companies in entire North America.
