From a designer’s perspective.
About more than 2 years ago, I started get my hands on writing requirements for anything I need to design, at beginning I didn’t know what I was doing and wasn’t so sure how a requirement document can benefit me during the design process. Now, I realized these documents have helped me very much in crafting the elegant user experience.
A requirement document is a story itself.
Very similar to reading the news: it needs an intro, then the whole story unfolds, depending on what your message is. If you are not able to write down clearly then you should re-think about your design, is it logical enough?
Always start with a short paragraph of Overview, you need to give context to whoever is reading your document, and then let your reader know why we are building this and who we are building it for. These are pretty straightforward; if you practice design long enough, you should always have the answer to these questions.
Fun part starts after the basics, next you should let your reader know what this product/feature can do? If you are writing for a new product, you are talking about high-level features of this app. Usually, I take all the high-level items from information architecture, then describe what each item does. That being said, you do need to do some exercise before starting to write the document. Card sorting, interviews really helps you to kick start.
Writing for new app product requirement helps the communication between designers, stakeholders and engineers, very often people have different vision in the company, these document is there to help.
Writing a feature document can get very specific, when you have the basic product running, we always want to build more and more to it. Feature specific document should not only mention the basic of why, who, what but also talk about how this feature can reflect to other features during the development. There is a lot of logical thinking when we writing down these, we use mind map to sort out logic graphically, so we should be able to describe those logic through out the document.
Feature specific document can help engineers sort out their code structure and get them to start asking questions, it is normal that you won’t be able to draft out all the possible angles by text, this is why engineers are your best partners.
so the base of product/design document are:
Overview
- Why are we building this?
- Who are we building this for?
- What can this do?
This might affect the others. How do we solve that? (When the doc is feature-specific)
Extension of this, how can we extend this and get other benefit if we build this
When we are doing design, we are also telling a story. How might we draft out a compelling story to your reader is quite interesting. Hope this document helps you. 🙂
