What handoff should actually include

Handoff has quietly degraded into sharing a link. The tools got good enough at inspecting spacing that everyone concluded the rest of the conversation was optional. It was not — inspection tells an engineer what the padding is, never what should happen when the list is empty or the request times out.

The checklist

Before I call a design ready, I go through the same list. It takes an afternoon and removes most of the questions that would otherwise arrive one at a time across three weeks.

• Every state designed and labelled — see the eleven-state list.
• Interactive behaviour specified: what is tappable, what it does, what it does on a slow connection.
• Validation rules and error copy written out, not implied by a red border.
• Responsive behaviour at each breakpoint, including the awkward middle one.
• Motion specified with duration, easing and a reduced-motion alternative.
• Accessibility annotations: focus order, labels, roles, announcements.
• Assets exported in the formats and densities the team actually uses.
• A live walkthrough with the whole engineering team, recorded once.

Then stay reachable

The questions that matter arrive during the build, not at the handoff meeting. An open channel and a design QA pass on staging are worth more than any amount of documentation written in advance — because the thing you failed to specify is, by definition, the thing you did not think to document.