Not everything in UX design is sexy but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t beautiful
Without documentation, creative endeavors would be chaotic.
When starting any UX project, what should you be doing right from the start? Documentation. Prior to taking any UX-related design classes, I didn’t realize how vast the field was; I didn’t know that we had to document the overall design process of projects. I also was not aware of the essence of being articulate about your designs because I thought that as long as the design looked good to me, it was fine. I was way off! Shows how little I knew about UX design, right?
UX design is more than just good, sexy designs. Too often, people mistake design for art; they don’t understand the value of it and how it goes deeper than the surface. There’s a lot of hard work and unsexiness put into design projects behind the scenes.
“Design is not art. It is about crafting solutions to real issues.”
— Mark Boulton, Designer
I’ve learned that a design not only has to look good but also has to be functional; it’s about coming up with solutions to real issues. A good rule of thumb that stood out to me in the reading “Great Designers are Great Communicators” was that any great UX design should do three things:
1. Solve a problem
2. Be easy for users
3. Be supported by everyone
By following this guideline and documenting the process of how a product came to be, this can encourage conversation. Documentation with purpose not only helps designers but also clients understand why certain design decisions were made. It’s easier to look at these deliverables as stories rather than strategic UX documents because looking at it this way, makes it less overwhelming. The outline of a documentation is like a story that is divided up into three sections: beginning, middle, and end. It should be a well-organized and easy-to-understand story that can be used as a future reference to benefit other designers. Documenting the vision, challenge, design principles, and plan will help establish the design direction and increase efficiency.
Even though the entire documentation process is a very time-consuming and tedious task, it is highly crucial since it keeps things clean and organized. Now that I have taken design classes, I can see why documenting the steps that I take is vital to helping other people understand why I did something a certain way in a project. By the end of the deliverable, the reader should then be able to identify certain things in the project like what the current state of the project is, what the overall theme of the project is, what the most important design decisions are, etc.
An example of documentation
As discussed in the Validation & Design Guide shown above, some key components to include in any design-related documentation may be:
- Project overview: Makes sure that you and everyone else who’s involved in the project is on the same page.
- Goals: Provides a clearer direction on what the project will accomplish.
- Target audiences & personas: Narrows down the audience to a specific group of people who will be using the product.
- Design strategy: Roadmap or planning process to how the final product will be accomplished.
Conclusion
Documentation is an important step that can’t be skipped in any project, in any industry. Without it, crafting a solid project would be difficult and nearly impossible — it would be chaotic. As UX designers, we have to have a clear direction or scope of the project at all times. Therefore, the documentation of the project should include all the content that is necessary to get the message across clearly and concisely. By having a well thought out, concise, and organized deliverable, we will be able to communicate design ideas and concepts in a way that would establish credibility. If you aren’t articulate about design, the product loses value so it’s important to always keep in mind that as the project progresses, so should the documentation. The beauty of documentation is that you’ll have a product’s lifecycle on file and see how much time and effort was put into the product over time.
Here’s another way to look at UX Design:
Ellie Hoyt is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web Design with an emphasis in Interaction & Design. This article relates to the importance of documentation in the DGM 1240 Communicating Digital Design course and representative of the skills learned.
