Documenting design decisions is important for product designers

Documenting your design decisions will help you communicate them.

Here is what the developer said to me: Why does the table have a column “uploaded by”? That wasn’t in our last meeting. Let me look at the design decision document I said to him.

Several minutes later, I told the developer that this column was added after our meeting (in which he also took part) since we thought it would be useful to the users. This is because people who work on the system will be able to track the tickets and ask the person who opened them questions if they need to. This will help them get the job done faster.

I have heard this type of question many times over the years from developers, product managers, project managers, and other designers from the design team about solutions the teams and I were working on.

The truth is, we can make any decision we want. It can be a good decision or a bad decision, but most times nobody remembers why. Including you. In this article, I will explain why it is crucial to document design decisions to be able to deal with these situations quickly.

What is a design decision document?

The design decision document is where all the decisions you and the team made about the design are recorded. For example, if you decide to divide a form into two parts instead of one, you can put it there. Another example could be when you decide to use a modal that asks the user to type the project name before deleting it. This documentation is referred to as a design decision document, and it contains all of the pertinent details about the design decision. I also pass it to the developers as part of the deliverables for the design to development handoff.

What are the reasons for documenting design decisions?

From my point of view, this document is important because:

You and the team will not remember the decision you made

When we design we are very focused on the task. However, 3 weeks later, when the task is handed over to the developers, we can’t remember…