A short, gritty explanation for teammates, managers, and stakeholders.
Scenario one. Welcome, you're the new UI/UX Designer for a team, that before your arrival, never had this position. It's splendid they saw a need and sought out a solution. But now, you're tasked with educating as the UX evangelist. You also don't want your efforts to go unnoticed.
Scenario two. Your request for dedicated time during the sprint to create a design document is challenged. In a developer-heavy team, it wasn't a part of the team's development cycle. Creating a design document may not have fallen into the team's definition of actionable or billable.
This post will be your cheat sheet to answer why it's vital to create a design document and aid in backing your stance.
A design document is often made by a product designer, though it can be handled by UI/UX designer or others in a similar role. The design document is an exercise to discover a project's focus[1]. It helps set direction, a clear path for the project, as well as goals. These benefits are in addition to keeping everyone on track during the design journey.
In larger teams, designers or even developers are often moved to other projects or brought in the middle of a sprint. It'd be for the project's benefit if the person now tasked with aiding in the charge has a clear understanding of the project and a record of the project choices.
Having a design document can be a time saver. Imagine the talks that'd ensue every time these changes occurred. Compare this to simply having a clear and detailed briefing handed down and further questions posed when necessary.
“The design document is an exercise to discover a project's focus.”
A design document can also help with avoiding feature creeps. Feature creep is a tendency for product or project requirements to increase during development beyond those originally foreseen — Tech Target[2]. Why this is a bad thing can be further elaborated in another post, but for now, I'll leave you with UX Collective's Ian Batterbee explanation.
Now, what more can a design document do? Let's say a feature needs to be reevaluated, and the team doing so consists of only two members who were present when it was first executed. After all, it's been over three years and a half, and the faces present have changed.
It could also be the team's desire to repurpose a feature. Digging up a design document can help avoid reinventing the wheel. After all, this is research that was previously completed.
So the above reasons aren't turning heads. Let's jump into a speed round of helpful reasons that point to a pro design document stance.
- A design document can help remind the team why past decisions were made.
- A design document is also helpful for passing a project down from designer to developer.
- It can also be leaned on for presentations to stakeholders.
- A well-made design document can become a recipe to replicate good results.
Yes, it takes time to create a design document, but it takes more time and effort to make changes to a developed project like software.
