Will your users actually understand this?

Most products get a design review after they're already built. By then, the confusing parts are load-bearing — fixing them means rebuilding. Design Review catches those problems at the planning stage, when changing direction costs you a conversation instead of a week of rework.

You know how your product works because you built it. Your users don't have that advantage. They'll see your feature for the first time and need to figure it out immediately. Design Review asks the question you can't ask yourself: can a new person figure this out without help? It also checks whether your layout makes sense, whether the experience is consistent with the rest of your product, and whether you've thought about what happens when things go wrong — empty screens, error messages, slow loading.

Run it after writing your plan for any feature that people will see and interact with. It evaluates the flow, the layout, the consistency, and the edge cases you probably forgot about. Pair it with Engineering Review — whether something is buildable and whether it's usable are both things you should check before starting, not after shipping.

Any plan that changes what users see or how they interact with your product. If the change is purely behind the scenes — reorganizing your files, upgrading a dependency — you can skip it.