How to use UX documentation to collaborate effectively

7 key considerations for communicating complex UX ideas and details across large teams and different departments.

When you’re at a design agency, you’re already in the mindset that your work has to be organized, presented and documented for external stakeholders. You have to both convince people you’re right and create design artifacts that can be passed around an organization without you there to explain them. You don’t just do technical spec docs and red-lining — you create deliverables to outline how you’re solving problems, the reasoning behind decisions, synthesized results from research and testing, how you’re measuring impact, and more.

For designers in-house at a product company, there’s a lot to learn from that mindset. There can be an overwhelming amount of information moving around a company, with teams having little visibility into each other’s work. Design might be seen as a lower priority, or your work might just seem like a bunch of random, visual choices from someone who doesn’t have the context for your decisions.

Try documenting design work as if you are presenting to an external client. It creates efficiency, mutual understanding, and can help you make the case for design to be an authority for business and product decisions. In today’s post, I’m looking at seven key concepts for creating effective design documentation and tactical ways to execute them.

7 Essential Components of Effective Design Documentation

1 | Give Just Enough Context

When you’re in-house at a product company, all of the needed information for a project is available somewhere. But a good company has people with highly specific knowledge going deep into problems — which is why it can be easy to forget that not everyone has the same information.

Figure out everyone you need to talk to, and how they measure their own success. Is the lead of your growth team depending on this feature for new customers? Is someone in leadership responsible for evaluating ROI of every new project?