Building HEROES, a framework for structured design reviews
The problem
Over the years, I've facilitated countless design reviews at Expedia, and the same pattern kept showing up. Feedback defaulted to visual opinions, no matter what the presenter needed or where the screen sat in its lifecycle.
We also tried to include content designers and user researchers in those reviews, but it wasn't easy for them to contribute. Sitting through rounds of visual critique from product designers was intimidating, and made their feedback feel less legitimate by comparison.
I raised these observations with my team, then with other designers I worked with. Same fatigue, across the board. That's what got me asking: could a review be structured enough that the format did some of the work a facilitator does by instinct?
The idea
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I started from frameworks that already imposed structure on design problems: John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity and BlaBlaCar's simplification reviews. Together with one lens of my own, they became six:
Hide
Eliminate
Reduce
Organize
Enchant
Standardize
Enchant is the one I added. Neither of these frameworks had a lens for whether a screen builds trust or delight, so I added one called Enchant. That gap mattered most on the kind of products I worked on, where nobody's in the habit of asking "should this feel good to use?" Enterprise software doesn't get a pass on that just because it's enterprise software. Making Enchant one of the six lenses meant it got discussed on purpose, not only when someone happened to think of it.