A UX designer, Maria Meireles, discusses how her team developed a design specifications template to improve communication between designers, engineers, and product managers. With multiple projects happening simultaneously and stakeholders having varying needs, adequate documentation was needed.
Maria’s colleague Carla Cabeça started a “documentation guild” to address these issues. Through stakeholder interviews, they identified key pains such as missing details in prototypes and poorly documented design changes.
To solve these, Maria created a design specifications template. It includes sections for an overview, user journey, prototype, component breakdown, copy, research findings, changelogs, and questions. The template captures important details after a prototype is presented to engineers.
