: Program to generate non-static design spec docs? My design team has been using MS Word via Sharepoint to deliver UX specs to our developers. Our documents include a section for: final visuals,

@Holmes874

My design team has been using MS Word via Sharepoint to deliver UX specs to our developers


Heh. I've been there. I sympathize.

The problem is delivering UX specs. That means you're stuck in a waterfall process that avoids collaboration. As such, you can't ever succeed.

For this to work in a waterfall model, UX needs to take ownership of the presentation layer code and actually create the interactions. This then becomes the specification.

Anything short of that will always have big lost-in-translations issues no matter how heavily documented. In fact, I've found the heavier the documentation, the more confusion that it can lead to as developers start referring to month-old specs that have been updated 3 times since.


What solution would you strongly recommend?


as you've probably guessed, I strongly recommend none of those. You're just setting your team up to be a documentation team, which no one wants, and no one really benefits from anyways.

The options that I've seen work to some degree (at least way better than the heavy documentation model) is:


Switch to Agile Development (Lean UX) and/or...
Have UX own the presentation layer and/or...
Communicate constantly with the dev team. Have a lot of the specs come from joint collaboration--not a 2 month old document.


UX should never be a documentation/specification factory. They should be facilitators and sketchers. (One could argue that's how all members of the product team should operate).

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