Monday, April 29, 2024

What is the difference between requirements and design specifications?

design spec

By being so focused on the answer you can forget the question entirely. After you explain the core summary, timing, and budget for the product, it’s time to start writing user stories and functional specifications for your product. In other words, you must think more deeply about the specific user goals you’re trying to satisfy and clarify how the product will deliver on those expectations. Without countless sync meetings, both designers and developers can spare more time to do more important things—actual design and development. Good design specs help you save much time and improve your team's work efficiency.

Get feedback and run iterative cycles

A good product development company can help you with this and will know the regulations and certifications required for your product. They should also take those exact standards and turn them into technical device specs once your design is underway. Knowing what industry your product falls under can help the product development company identify any regulatory standards, certifications, or laws you may need to adhere to. A large part of writing product specs involves doing product research.

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When gathering feedback on design specs, encourage stakeholders to provide specific and actionable feedback. Vague or subjective feedback can be challenging to address effectively. Request that stakeholders identify specific sections, elements, or issues they would like to discuss or suggest improvements for. This helps focus the review process and ensures that the feedback provided is actionable. Design specs should be a starting point for discussion, not the final word. Encourage developers to ask questions, seek clarifications, and provide their input.

Benefits to a team

Visualizing the user experience as a part of design specs is a powerful feature which saves a designer significant time and improves clarity in the designer to developer handoff. Therefore, communication between designers and developers is a critical part of the product development process, especially during the developer handoff. Product teams can spend up to 50 percent of their time doing avoidable reworks, which cost precious time and money. Your design specification document should be a strong business component.

To provide additional context and clarity, use design notes and annotations to explain specific design decisions, highlight important details, or address any potential challenges. These notes can help developers better understand the design intent and make informed decisions during the implementation phase. Typography plays a significant role in design, impacting readability, brand identity, and visual hierarchy. Specify the font families, sizes, weights, and styles to be used in your design spec. Additionally, provide guidelines for headings, body text, and any other typographic elements unique to your project. Wireframes and mockups are visual representations of the design concept.

design spec

Development is difficult and bug-prone enough as it is without having them write line after line of code on the edge of their seat with no structure or plan to guide them. In fact, most developers worth their salt won’t code without one to begin with. Non-functional specs will detail the general characteristics of a system. This section is more about describing the product’s appearance, usability, level of intuitiveness, learning curve and how long it will take to complete certain tasks with it. Under stakeholders, you’ll put down the names and job descriptions of everyone involved in the project. You may also need to use the notes section to add any other relevant details about the items.

Components of a Comprehensive Design Spec

Manual specs are time-consuming and require designers to revise and update the document frequently whenever a new design version is created. The design specs are created right after you've completed the design prototyping phase. In many cases, designers start to prepare design specs after they've got the final version of the design drafts because this approach helps them avoid any waste. Writing a technical spec increases the chances of having a successful project, service, or feature that all stakeholders involved are satisfied with. A design spec is a document or a set of documents where you should specify all UI aspects like colors, styles, margins, alignments, sizes, assets, and so on.

In this case, you would need to alter your PDS or find another way of solving the problem you set out to fix. It can take hours, days, or even weeks to prepare the design spec document manually. However, once it has been created, it becomes much easier for designers to share all possible design values, elements, and other details with developers across teams.

If the team fails to agree on an issue even after having in-person meetings to hash them out, make the final call on it as the buck stops with you. Request engineers on different teams to review your spec so you can get an outsider’s perspective which will enhance how it comes across to stakeholders not part of the team. Update the document with any changes in the design, schedule, work estimates, scope, etc. even during implementation. Post implementation, it helps resolve problems that cropped up within the project, as well as provide insight in retrospectives and postmortems. The best planned specs serve as a great guide for measuring success and return on investment of engineering time. We normally have “refinement” sessions with the entire scrum team (architects, engineers, a product manager, quality analysis, and of course the designer).

There’s even a suggested part of the document to leave a link to your mockup or prototype, as well as a table for the development team to fill in ticketing issues. You can download our free Excel interior design spec sheet template below—but keep reading to learn the ins and outs of how to use spec sheets. A lot of times clients think too much about the features and design of the product, without considering the intended use. They come to us with an idea and a specific design that they believe will work. If you only set out to design your product in a specific way, you may be missing out on a cheaper or more efficient design.

While attention to detail is commendable, over-constraining can stifle creativity and innovation. Allow flexibility where possible — detail the ‘must-haves’ but leave room for ‘could-haves’ that designers can explore in the prototyping phase. For example, to find the spacing between objects, a developer selects the element and then hover the mouse over other elements on the screen to see the relative distances. With Design Specs (Beta), a developer has pixel perfect design properties readily available –everything from positioning to styling. When a developer clicks a design element on the screen, the position (X, Y) and size (width, height) as well as the appearance (color, border, opacity, etc) are shown on the right. By knowing your competitors and comparing them, you can make your product competitive.

Keep the information concise and organized, using clear headings, subheadings, and bullet points. Use visual hierarchy to prioritize important information and make it easily scannable for developers. A well-defined color palette enhances visual appeal and helps convey the desired mood and brand identity. Specify the primary and secondary colors, as well as any variations like gradients or tints, in your design spec. Include color codes or references to ensure accurate implementation. Performance metrics also help the team establish clear objectives for each feature or function, ensuring that every part of the product meets specific quality benchmarks.

This section outlines who is involved in the development of the product and who is accountable for decisions that need to be made. And, unfortunately, simple questions are few and far between when it comes to building technology products. Arrange your content in a logical structure that guides the reader smoothly through the detailed document. Consider using sections, sub-sections, headings, and subheadings to break up the text and make it more digestible. A properly crafted PDS (Product Design Specification) makes sure that everyone involved in developing the product understands what's going on. Streamline the most complex design projects all from one easy to use cloud-based platform.

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A well-organized interior design spec sheet can ensure no item is left behind and all your product and material costs are accounted for. A technical specification document outlines how you’re going to address a technical problem by designing and building a solution for it. It’s sometimes also referred to as a technical design document, a software design document, or an engineering design document.

Developers can run into issues with static specifications, especially if they don’t have enough details about the UI design, or if it contains dynamic elements. Good design specs bridge the gap between the prototype and development phases of the UX process. This simplifies and speeds up the process of creating a tangible product. In order to correctly write a user requirement document, you must know well those for whom you will design and develop the product. User requirements are statements in natural language with diagrams that describe the services the system is expected to offer to system users as well as the restrictions it must function under.

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