Effective Design Documentation without a Fuss

Design

The complexity of new design challenges demands better documentation faster. Designers can no longer hope to hand in a sheaf of wireframes and hope the project team can follow along. Instead, teams are more dependent on good deliverables and better pictures to communicate a complete story. And designers need to create documents faster, in part to accommodate rapidly changing methodologies. Finally, designers need to weigh the value of creating formal documentation against other methods of explaining design.

Regardless of your role in the design process–researcher, evaluator, designer, developer–creating and using documentation is essential. Design deliverables establish a plan for design activities, ensure that the team is aligned in their objectives, and set expectations for project stakeholders.

Though some interpretations of modern development methodologies suggest eschewing design documentation, a good framework for deliverables can adapt to a variety of circumstances. Design teams should not assume a one-size-fits all approach to their deliverables, but instead cultivate a toolkit that serves a range of design projects.

This workshop will teach participants understand what makes great design documentation, and how to get there faster. Using examples from EightShapes Unify – a free collections of deliverable templates - the workshop will dig into some of the techniques that can make deliverable preparation more efficient.

If you work on web projects and need to create, review, or approve design documentation, this workshop will help you develop a critical eye for deliverables.

By the end of this workshop you will:

• Establish the role of design documentation in your organization
• Have strategies for recognizing great deliverables and providing feedback on documentation
• Know how to plan a collection of basic templates for constructing design deliverables
• Know how to plan the structure and content of a deliverable before building it
• Understand how to adapt design deliverables to various circumstances
• Appreciate separating design deliverables from design artifacts to support reuse
• See how EightShapes Unify allows you to create design documents quickly