A Practical Guide to UX Specifications

Table Of Content

• What is the difference between requirements and design specifications?
• Questions for Reflection
• How an advanced digital product design shapes the future of tech
• A Practical Guide to UX Specifications
• Design Specs: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Flawless Designs
• Sit down with important members of your team
• Discover the Stunning World of Designer Charm Bracelets

Product specs can apply to physical products, digital products, or even services. If you were designing a new smartphone, the specs would describe the phone’s size, screen, storage capacity, and camera configurations. When coding the product, developers can also easily copy and paste any desired style codes of different elements into their coding programs. Developers can easily join the design workflow with a simple link and click on any interface position to inspect the related layer, style and asset data. Clicking or hovering over an element also allows them to view the spacing between different elements.

What is the difference between requirements and design specifications?

Citroen eC3 revealed for Europe: Design changes over India-spec model - The Times of India

Citroen eC3 revealed for Europe: Design changes over India-spec model.

Posted: Wed, 18 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

If designers need to further explain an idea or design detail, they can also directly add manual specs to the design screen and enrich their design specs. This article will walk you through all basics of design specs for a website or mobile project and answer what design specs are, why and when you should use them, and how to create design specs. Investing in a technical spec ultimately results in a superior product. Since the team is aligned and in agreement on what needs to be done through the spec, big projects can progress faster.

Questions for Reflection

Even after you’ve launched your product, it’s important to continue gathering feedback. This will help you improve the product over time and keep it in line with user needs. The release is where your hard work comes together, and your product is finally available to the public. In our example, you would research the target audience to understand their demographics, what kind of content they currently enjoy, and the designs they prefer. Now that you know what to include in product specs, let’s take a look at how to write one.

How an advanced digital product design shapes the future of tech

If you’ve heard the term before, you might also be wondering, what is a cut sheet in interior design and how is that different from a spec sheet? As we have covered in the blog, a design spec doc serves many vital purposes. Communication and collaboration become way easier when there is a common reference document for all to utilize. You can ping us here if you are still not convinced with this whole idea and get an inside look at how we make it work. One medical device we developed required a specific type of packaging seal.

A spec is essential in managing complexity and preventing scope and feature creep by setting project limits. It sets priorities thereby making sure that only the most impactful and urgent parts of a project go out first. We have in the market tons of tools that help us organize our Agile environment, tools like Jira and Monday. Normally, scrum teams have their backlog on those tools and the design spec will be one more (or much more) ticket(s) on their list.

By writing a technical spec, engineers are forced to examine a problem before going straight into code, where they may overlook some aspect of the solution. When you break down, organize, and time box all the work you’ll have to do during the implementation, you get a better view of the scope of the solution. Product specifications can help you build a shared understanding across teams and stakeholders, but they are not a silver bullet. Product specs are most impactful when you integrate them with the messy, back-and-forth process of solving your customers’ problems and figuring out how to best serve their needs. This product specification template contains all the components described above as well as instructions to help you get started. A common challenge I find is to create a shared understanding about a given feature that needs building.

Design Specs: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Flawless Designs

Rather, if it’s possible, try to include at least one person from each department involved in the product’s development, including the client. Lastly, having a functional specifications document from the start with all the features of the solution that you’re solving for the user well-defined will help prevent the dreaded feature creep. Functional specification documents are designed in such a way that they inform developers what they have to build and why. They describe how exactly the features laid out are going to solve certain problems for the users.

Sit down with important members of your team

By adhering to such a framework, product designers can anticipate the necessities, challenges, and aspirations for bringing their innovation to the market with precision and intent. In the quest to craft an impeccable Product Design Specification, leveraging the right templates and tools can streamline the process, fostering precision and efficiency. PDS templates serve as valuable starting points, offering a structured format that can be customized to suit the specifics of any project. In the realm of product development, the efficacy of a Product Design Specification lies in its meticulous composition. An effective Product Design Specification (PDS) is both a reflection of market demands and a roadmap to the product’s success.

Developers can easily click an asset layout and view the data on the right panel. See how design choices, interactions, and issues affect your users — get a demo of LogRocket today. You should include their team early on in the process, showcasing your research, ideas, and mostly the prototypes to avoid any roadblocks.

You can find competitors and analyze them simply by searching in Google search. You can also assess the ads your competitors are creating by entering keywords into the search bar. Of course, if the chair can be approved for a person being 120[kg] and the packaging dimension of 80x450x450[mm], then the requirements are still met. Here you’ll show how the ticketing will be done to handle any bugs or issues that crop up during the development phase and even afterwards. By signing up, I agree to the Houzz Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and that Houzz may use my information to contact me about relevant content, products, and services.

Honor Launches Foldable Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design with Custom Snapdragon CPU, 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB ROM - gizmochina

Honor Launches Foldable Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design with Custom Snapdragon CPU, 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB ROM.

Posted: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Because prototyping tools are used before source code is written, the ability to generate documentation automatically is both useful and quick. Quick because you don’t need to spend time creating lengthy documents and useful because your developer will be able to understand exactly what you want. It includes five major sections, starting with the introduction that covers the purpose, scope, background and constraints. That section is followed by the methodology and then the functional requirements, where you lay down the context, user requirements and user flow diagrams. This short template comes with questions that ask you to write in the details about your planned website without any technical knowledge required. It includes sections such as the purpose and business goals of the website, the target user personas and the organization of the website.

It serves as a brilliant example of how to integrate use cases, screen mockups and user flows in one document. It’s clear hierarchical numerical layout means that anyone who reads the document can easily navigate to any element within the document using the index. The post condition will indicate the state of the app’s system after running a use case. In the case of the car rental app we mentioned above, the product’s post condition will depend on whether the user selects the new vehicle or not. These templates already come with a table of contents and many come with all of the sections and headers you will need.

In addition, it should include a map of functionalities like related strategies, user flows, pipelines, and every other document you’ve used to plan your design. Consider establishing dedicated Design Ops or Design Systems teams to oversee the creation and maintenance of design specs for large projects. Design tokens and variables help streamline the design process and ensure consistency across different design specs.

Clearly defining these metrics in the product design specification is essential for delivering a top-notch product that aligns with customer expectations. A well-defined product design specification guides the product development team and ensures that everyone in the company is on the same page. It may also give specific examples of how the design should be executed, helping others work properly (a guideline for what the person should do). A designers can also benefit from reviewing the user flow with the development team.

By having a well-written product specification sheet, you can avoid pitfalls and help the entire organization understand the product goals. So, in this article, we’ll give you a crash course on everything you need to know, including what product specs are, why they’re important, and what your document should include. One way is by writing a clear and concise product specification sheet. For example, in Mockplus, all design specs are directly displayed on the interface screen and allow developers to view any details on click or hover. Before designers start to prepare the design specs, they should also take developers on the same page and discuss some design ideas together. By doing that designers ensure that all design ideas are executable for developers.