Keeping the Details From Falling Through
Web design has grown complex enough that small but critical details often slip away in the final push before launch. Checklists remain one of the most practical ways to keep those details front and center, and a fresh wave of resources now covers everything from accessibility and design systems to research methods and form controls.
Design Practice Collections
Checklist Design, created by George Hatzis, is a growing collection of best design practices organized by page type, element, flow, topic, and branding. It offers a single place to browse common patterns and the finer points that go with them.
For teams planning or scaling a design system, the open-source Design System Checklist from reshaped covers design language, design tokens, core components, tooling, and project management. The checklist is also available as a Figma community file, and the companion Design Systems Handbook offers deeper reading.
Workday's Canvas Design System takes component selection further by including flow charts that guide both designers and non-designers toward the right component for a given situation, complete with outcome examples.
Accessibility Reference Points
Two thorough accessibility checklists stand out for their depth. The Accessibility Not-Checklist, from intopia, groups points by topic and WCAG success criteria, with filters for WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, and best practice recommendations. You can sort the list by topic or by role.
The A11y Project Checklist goes into similar detail across forms, controls, video, audio, and animation. Each section links to the relevant WCAG criteria with examples and guidance for further reading.
Project Structure and Tools
For teams wrangling a design system, the Design System Checklist template for Trello shows one way to structure the work and keep everyone aligned. Even outside Trello, the template offers useful ideas for organizing your own list around a project of that scale.
The Gov.UK team has published a full collection of styles and components for UK Government services. Since the components were tested and validated during their design, they can serve as a reference for exploring states or conditions your own designs may not have considered. For local work, the GOV.UK Prototype Kit installs the components, and the GOV.UK Design System documents their usage in prototyping.
UX Recipe, maintained by Alecsandru Grigoriu, helps you choose project tools and techniques by group, with hashtags leading to additional resources for each category. It also includes time estimates for planning the required work.
Research and Interaction Guidance
Selecting a UX research method among the roughly 20 common approaches can be easier with the UX Research Methods Flowchart from the Nielsen Norman Group. The chart groups methods into behavioral, attitudinal, qualitative, and quantitative categories so you can match a strategy to the insights you need.
Form design presents a similar decision problem. Lyft's design team created a form selection control flow chart after struggling to settle on the right segmented control, as Runi Goswami describes. The chart helps designers and non-designers decide which component fits a particular question.
For evaluating interaction design, the IxD Checklist by Aaron Legaspi and Amit Jakhu provides a framework for assessing any control, navigation, or interface. It tests designs against affordance, simplicity, structure, consistency, accessibility, tolerance, and feedback.
Tables and Timelines
Complex tables come with their own set of easily missed details. Slava Shestopalov's article on architecting complex tables includes a comprehensive table tree checklist that covers those often-overlooked points.
Outside the checklist category, Markwhen converts markdown-like text into a cascading timeline, useful for project planning or personal milestones. A VS Code extension is also available.
