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Be kind to future designers with annotations
Or: How to best use your time if your project isn’t being funded
Right now is when many UX practitioners, especially those in academia or government, are feeling lost.
The next fiscal year is around the corner, and sometimes that comes with the news that your project won’t be funded for the following year.
Sometimes it’s sudden; sometimes, you have weeks to process it. But either way, you may find yourself unsure what to do next: after all, it’s unlikely that any user research or designs are going to be tested or implemented at this point.
But there’s one thing that you can do that will be incredibly helpful in the future: annotating your designs.
Annotation is something we often don’t do because we may not have time in our work cycles to work on something like that constantly. But if you’re wrapping up a project, it can be something that you can use to properly address ideas, thoughts, processes, and more. And it’s essential for one main reason: you may not be around to explain your reasoning later on.
Creating a time capsule for the future
One of the most important things to realize is that projects can be vitally important to the organization, but they might still be cut “temporarily” due to budget issues. This means that there’s a likelihood that the business may revisit the project, but it’s almost a guarantee that it won’t be the same team. Sometimes the business will revisit the project in 5 or 10 years after you’ve left the company. Even if you are still on it, you may have to explain the reasoning, processes, and more to an entirely new set of developers, business analysts, project owners, and managers.
So the first essential thing to annotate is a date stamp of when we made these changes or decisions and why.
We may believe otherwise, but nobody in the future team is going to do a deep dive into meeting notes, user research, or more to understand the team’s rationale at the time. There are two places people will look to try and understand all of the features and things they need to take care of: they’re going to look at something like a prioritized backlog of user…
