Writing is the design review

I have never caught a structural problem in a design by looking at it. Not once. The mockup always looks fine — that is what mockups are for. They are a picture of the state of the system where everything went well, drawn by the person who most wants everything to go well.

What catches the problem is being made to write a paragraph about it.

Prose has no empty states

A canvas lets you leave things out. You can draw the list with three items in it and never decide what the list does with none, or four hundred, or one with a name long enough to break the row. The picture is complete either way, and completeness is exactly what your eye is checking for.

A sentence cannot do that. The moment you write the customer picks a plan and continues, you have to know whether they can go back, and the sentence just sits there being wrong until you decide. Language forces sequence, and sequence is where designs actually fail.

The two-page rule

Before anything gets built I write two pages. Not a spec — a description, in plain sentences, of what happens. Who arrives, what they see, what they do, what the system does back, and every place either of them can be surprised.

It takes about ninety minutes and it is the highest-leverage ninety minutes in the project. The holes announce themselves as friction in the writing: a paragraph that will not come out clean is almost always describing a flow that is not clean. When I find myself reaching for then the system determines, I have found the part nobody has designed.

If the sentence needs a passive voice to stay true, the design has a decision in it that nobody has made.

It survives the meeting

The second benefit is unglamorous and possibly more valuable. Two pages of prose can be read by an engineer, a support lead, and a lawyer, in that order, without a walkthrough. A Figma file cannot. It needs its author present to mean anything, which means the design only exists during the meeting.

I still draw. The drawing is how you decide what it looks like, and no amount of prose will get you a good screen. But the drawing comes second now, and it goes much faster, because by then all the arguing is finished.