Monday, April 29, 2024

Functional Specification Documents: your complete guide

design spec

Include these in your design spec to give a clear understanding of the layout, hierarchy, and visual elements. Use wireframes to showcase the structure and placement of different design elements, and mockups to depict the final visual aesthetics. There may be hurdles like budget restrictions, technical limits, or legal rules to navigate. Spot these early in the design process to ensure your end product is doable and meets all requirements.

Pick which product specifications to include

If the team can adhere to these standards early, it's easier to track progress and ensure your final product ticks all the boxes. Armed with a solid grasp of purpose, scope, and your audience, it's time to list the nuts and bolts of what your product should do. Identify the specific features and functions it needs to meet your audience's needs. You can achieve this through user testing, where people from your target group interact with the product and provide feedback.

Avoiding Over-Constrained Designs

Or, if your team has all Figma licenses, you don’t need to export anything to an external tool. On the other hand, developers do not have this trained eye, and they don’t have to. They need to be masters of the technology behind the scenes and ensure all functionalities are working well. As designers, we must have a surgical eye for all UI elements like colors, fonts, alignments, margins, etc.

Collaboration and Communication Tools

This document serves as a reference and guideline for all parties involved in the development process, including designers, engineers, project managers, and stakeholders. By following the design specification, the product design agency can deliver an exceptional finished product. Design specs serve as a common language between designers and developers, facilitating effective collaboration. By providing detailed information about layout, typography, color schemes, and interactions, design specs offer clarity and minimize the need for back-and-forth communication.

By acknowledging the constraints, the project team can create a realistic schedule, allocate resources properly, and set expectations accordingly in the beginning. This ensures that the project gets completed on time, within the agreed cost, and meets the satisfaction of stakeholders. To make sure a product meets customers' expectations, it's crucial to pinpoint the target audience and grasp their requirements.

Design specs create the opportunity for developers to visualize and accurately collect this information. We live in a multi-screen world where designers and developers create products that live on multiple platforms and devices. One of the most important, yet overlooked, aspects of all great product teams, is the relationship between designers and developers. Try to avoid these basic mistakes and you will be able to write a quality design specification document. Your business goals are the results that you hope to achieve and maintain as you run your business. As an entrepreneur, you are concerned with all aspects of your business and must have clear goals for your company.

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The point of the kickoff is to confirm that you have the required skills and decision makers in place to bring the product vision to reality. Before you start on any endeavor with your product, you need to go through a discovery process. This process can be done in hours or weeks — regardless of the scope, it is the foundation of the alignment you seek. However, just because you write all the details down does not mean you get everyone to agree or understand.

Always include a timeline for the development and delivery of the product. Although the timeline could change, it’s important to set realistic expectations from the start and focus on managing progress throughout. By having a detailed, well-written product specification, you can avoid potential problems and keep everyone on the same page. When you’ve thoroughly reviewed it, send the draft out to your team and the stakeholders. Address all comments, questions, and suggestions as soon as possible. Schedule meetings to talk through issues that the team is divided on or is having unusually lengthy discussions about on the document.

Here, your product starts to take form, moving from theory to tangible. This integral step demands scrutiny and attention to detail as it breathes the first gust of life into your product design. A PDS is the blueprint, facilitating communication across teams and serving as the reference point throughout the product’s life cycle. When constructed with diligence and foresight, it not only steers projects to completion but also underpins innovation and drives efficiency. As the Product Design Specification (PDS) materializes into a detailed plan, preparations for prototyping and testing become the focus. Confirm that your document includes clear testing strategies and quality benchmarks, giving structure to the subsequent evaluation phases.

These are problems that you will have unearthed during the requirements gathering stage, when you conduct research into your user personas to validate the problems defined by the client. Inventing is an iterative process and despite all your best efforts, your design may not work within the parameters you defined. For example, you build your product, but upon testing discover that it does not work correctly.

Again, developers do not have the trained eye you have to see small details, and we all know small details matter a lot because they have a huge impact on the user experience. Adding all user experience flow details is crucial for good communication among product, design, and development. LogRocket identifies friction points in the user experience so you can make informed decisions about product and design changes that must happen to hit your goals. With LogRocket, you can understand the scope of the issues affecting your product and prioritize the changes that need to be made. LogRocket simplifies workflows by allowing Engineering, Product, UX, and Design teams to work from the same data as you, eliminating any confusion about what needs to be done. During the final stage, it’s time to think about what it will take to bring your solution to the first customer group at the level of quality you desire.

design spec

An exception flow would be where the user navigates to the wrong part of the app, such as the “reserve new vehicle section”. The unit images should be good quality and accurately display the color, print, tone, etc. of the item. Include the product name and the model number from the vendor site or catalog, and include a link to the item if purchasing online. We were asked to develop a device used by bariatric patients where the maximum amount of force applied to it would be 200 pounds. The company wanted us to develop a plastic device that could withstand 700 pounds.

Strike a balance by ensuring all critical parameters are adequately detailed, while still encouraging input and improvisation during the development process. Clearly defined goals and transparent communication are vital in fostering a shared understanding of the PDS content. It’s possible to drastically reduce iteration time by improving communication in a team right from the beginning of a project.

At this last stage, you should think about which countries/regions of the world your product is intended to be released in? For example, if your product is an online store, paying online is a must-have thing (or a market standard). A software specification contains detailed descriptions of the software to be created.

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