The Build Test

Seven questions before the handoff.

Run it on one flow before the design goes to whoever builds it, with that person in the room. It takes about 20 minutes, and it works on somebody else’s design as well as ours.

  1. Who builds this, and have they seen it yet?

    Comes first · the other six depend on it

    Name a person, not a department. If the answer is an outside vendor nobody has met, the design is about to be reinterpreted by someone who wasn’t there when the decisions were made. If they haven’t seen it yet, show it to them before asking the other six questions. They’ll answer most of those faster than anyone else in the room.

  2. What’s in this design that has no existing component behind it?

    Catches · silent substitution

    Go screen by screen and mark everything the component library doesn’t already have. Some of those marks are the point of the design and should stay. The rest are near-misses, like a card a few pixels off the card that already exists, and each one gets rebuilt from scratch because nobody knew the old one was close enough. That’s silent substitution, and a year of it is how a system with a few dozen components ends up in a product with hundreds of one‑offs.

  3. What does this cost in engineering weeks, and who estimated that?

    Catches · ambition shaving

    The number should come from the person who will build it. A designer’s guess doesn’t count, however good it is. The part of a design nobody estimated is the part that gets cut when the schedule tightens, and it’s usually the most distinctive part. That’s ambition shaving. Pricing the bold move early is the most reliable way we know to keep it.

  4. Which constraint does this quietly ignore?

    Catches · re‑litigation

    There’s nearly always one: a content field that can’t hold formatting, prices that arrive without the discount applied, a brand rule about the logo on a dark ground. An ignored constraint doesn’t go away. It comes back mid‑build as an argument, and the decision gets made again by whoever is in the room that week. That’s re‑litigation. Write down the constraint and what the design does about it, so it only has to be decided once.

  5. What happens when the content is missing, wrong, or four times as long?

    Catches · state amnesia

    Designs get drawn with the content that makes them look good. The real product will have an empty account, a failed payment, a product name that runs to three lines, and a photo somebody uploaded sideways. If those states aren’t designed, engineering invents them under deadline. That’s state amnesia, and it’s why so much of what people see on a bad day was never designed by anyone.

  6. What’s the degraded version that ships if time runs out—and is that version still worth building?

    Catches · ambition shaving, before it happens

    Something will get cut. Deciding now what goes first puts that call with the people who know why each piece is there. Left until later, it falls to whoever is closest to the deadline. And if the cut‑down version isn’t worth shipping, that’s much better to learn before the build starts than in week ten.

  7. Who owns this six months from now?

    Catches · ownerless drift

    The answer is the person who gets the ticket when it needs to change. Without a name here, the work decays one reasonable exception at a time: a spacing change for one campaign, a color somebody needed for a chart. That’s ownerless drift, and six months is about how long it takes for anyone to notice.

Two of these do most of the work, and they’re the two nobody asks. The first is what this looks like in the state nobody drew. Not the error state, which usually gets drawn, but the one where the data is fine and there’s an unreasonable amount of it, or none at all, or a name that’s 60 characters long. The second is who owns the component in March. Not who builds it: who gets the ticket when it needs to change, and whether that person was in the room when it was designed.

Short on time? Ask five and seven.

How to run it

Running it

  • One flow at a timeA checkout, an onboarding sequence, one page template. A whole product at once produces a list nobody acts on.
  • Who’s in the roomWhoever designed it and whoever will build it, plus the person who can approve a cut if that’s someone else.
  • WhenBefore the design goes to the people who build it, and early enough that an answer can still change the design. In week two a change is a quick edit; in week eight it’s a rework.
  • How longAbout 20 minutes per flow. When it runs longer, question one has usually turned up something worth the time.
  • What to bringThe design file, real content instead of placeholder text, and access to the component library.

Reading what comes back

  • A blank answerThat’s the finding. Give it an owner and a date, and it becomes the cheapest problem on the project.
  • “We’ll figure it out in the build”Counts as a blank. It means the decision gets made under deadline by whoever is nearest.
  • There’s no scoreCount the blanks, put a name next to each one, and run it again right before handoff.
  • On our own workNothing we design is handed over until it has been through the Build Test. How a project runs shows where it sits.
Next step

More blanks than time before the build?

A paragraph about the work and what the test turned up is enough for us to say whether we’re the right studio to help, and we reply within one business day.

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