#Future checklist
This is a list of things that can potentially help your projects when you're thinking about the future. It's initially intended to act as a reference point for one of my talks
##Aims
- Better consider our users’ changing needs.
- Identify opportunities.
- Aid prioritisation.
- Better define what the product is and what it will be.
- More robust decisions - understand limitations and benefits of choices.
- React quickly/better to change by embracing evolution.
- Make more exciting things!
##Discovery & planning These are things that you should probably already be doing.
- Plan content first
- Separate your content from presentation - this will better cater for new display options, visual or otherwise
- Where screens are involved, think from small to large
- Prioritise your requirements
- Create a backlog and a roadmap, and keep these visible to people.
These are things that you could maybe do more of.
- Consider not only the problems that need solving now, but the problems that may need solving.
- Consider shifting usage patterns, interactions, and behaviours - what may be different?
- Embrace wider, general trends such as remote working.
- Refer to the past to learn from it, not only in terms of what is realistic, how long things will take, or what the problems may be, but also to identify opportunities.
- Create a set of high level principles for the project to follow.
##Doing These are things that you should probably already be doing.
- Embrace web standards, semantics, open formats.
- Responsive design and progressive enhancement.
- Track and manage change.
- Think atomically.
- Create incrementally, release often.
- Embrace automation.
- Document (not heavily), but leave your future self a record of why things happened the way they did.
- Prototype and test.
These are things that you could maybe do more of.
- Allocate time to bring the past up to scratch and to look at the future.
- Explore ideas using stories and design fiction thinking - especially within workshops.
- Consider the lifespan of project components; review these periodically.
- Promote concepts of separation, modularity, loosely-coupled architectures and services.
##Evolving These are things that you should probably already be doing.
- Share your experiences.
- Keep an eye on specs and upcoming technologies.
- Use your data.
These are things that you could maybe do more of.
- Better digital preservation - you can't learn from it if it's not there.
- Play more.