Design Specification
Why?
Describe the characteristics of a product, like a website or an application, in order to inform the designers and developers who are involved.
How?
The design specification contains models of the product and some argumentation for the design choices that have been made. A design specification can consist of user stories, wireframes, flow charts, wireflows, sitemaps, style guides, mock-ups or screen designs, etc. As the number of people involved in the design and development process increases, these documents become more important in order to keep everybody informed about design choices.
Ingrediënts
- Design/prototyping tools such as Adobe tools, Invision, Balsamiq, Sketch.
- The ability to model and visualize the design in a way that it is clear to all stakeholders.
- The ability to choose appropriate modelling techniques.
In practice
Design specifications are ubiquitous in design practice, although the tools used, differ greatly from company to company and project to project. In an agile project though, it is common practice to minimize the amount of design specifications.