Design Documentation: The heartbeat of a product design.
Your heart. Your idea. it’s beating.
Product design is a collaborative process between designers, clients, and users. Design documentation fuels that collaboration, driving a project forward, and leaving a story of product evolution in its wake.
A story that includes: ideas and the user research behind them, as well as design decisions and the rationale behind them.
During a project’s discovery phase, it is hard to understand and hash out the design problems without any documentation.
When it comes to large projects, we’ve all been there. The product team is in the trenches coding towards a distant launch date. This is often the time when you and your colleagues are pressing for updates.
Why it’s important to write design documentation?
The purpose of design documentation is to express the vision for the product, describes its contents, and present an implementation plan.
A design document is a way for you to communicate to others what your design decisions are.
Documentation means different things to different members of the team and it’s a team effort as almost everyone on the team plays games and can make great contributions to the design. The lead designer is the lead author of all the documentation except the technical specification, which is written by the senior programmer or technical director.
To a producer (company), it’s a book from which he should narrate. If the producer doesn’t read the design documents or make his team read them, then they are next to worthless.
To a designer, they are a way of fleshing out the producer’s vision and providing specific details on how the game will function.
To a programmer and artist, they are instructions for implementation.
Design documentation keeps everyone on track during the project journey
Conclusion:
Beyond being the heartbeat that keeps your project moving and improving, design documentation is what you pay for in a project… And it’s the responsibility of design teams to deliver. If you feel like design documentation is a lifeless add-on or supplement to a project, then your design team simply isn’t using best practices.
Happy reading & happy to hear your view.
