A Guide to Lightweight UX Documentation

Lightweight UX documentation makes for a productive team. It’s through documentation that a design firm can measure the usefulness of its UX elements. Documentation is not only about creating paperwork. It’s about bringing together a mission, vision, and team that gives life to your goals.

So, What exactly is Documentation?

Documentation is the archiving of your projects. It includes the planning, designing, and development of new products. It also involves the measuring of performance from completed projects. It consists of various participants such as the UX specialists, designers, users, stakeholders, and developers.

What documentation does is that it keeps most successful companies afloat. It helps in the release of new products and tracking of progress. It moves decision making from boardrooms to where it should be concentrated - the end-users.

How to Determine the Usefulness of UX Documentation

For UX documentation to be considered useful, there are three things it should fulfill;

The first is to help you in decision making. Imagine this. You are a web design company specializing in developing responsive websites. You have stakeholders, UX specialists, web designers, developers, and marketers supporting your activities.

And for your team members to collaborate effectively, you need a tool that guides their work. You require a document to assist in decision making and ensure continuity in operations even when teams change. Additionally, you’ll need a document that will demonstrate a step-by-step process of how the entire product strategy should run.

Second, proper documentation should focus on end-users. It doesn’t make sense for your team to develop a product design that’s not useful to the target audience. That’s why documentation is important since it opens opportunities for detailed UX research. It also gives the teams a chance to brainstorm and develop ideas likely to work in diverse settings.

Lastly, the usability of a document determines its usefulness. Think of it this way. You have a diverse group that will access the document. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and if your document is written from a UX specialist’s perspective, some information may be hard to translate. Thus, it may take longer to launch since people will be lost trying to understand the message.

For this reason, the document needs to be simple. You must include all important information but keep it focused on the documentation process. If there are technical terms that need to be used, highlight them and have additional material that explains the context in detail.

Why Does Lightweight Documentation Matter?

Most of the usefulness of documentation could also be the reason why it matters. But to help you better understand the benefits, we’ve categorized them into four major groups.

Assists in Categorizing Ideas

Documentation enables you to maintain order. It’s an indication of every stage of your design process. It shows what was done, at which time, and the team behind the project. It also helps team members to focus on their roles in the design process.

Useful for Updating New Members

Someone joining your team, especially during an ongoing project, needs to know what you have been working on. Documentation will inform the new-comer of your progress and save time on lengthy introductions.

Acts as Reference Material

UX specialists can use documentation to save projects for future reference. This helps in the reflection and improvement of future designs. It will also save time since you do not have to start every product design from scratch.

Best for Marketing

When marketing a project to top companies, the best way to do it is through documentation. Involving the target prospect has proved to be more beneficial than showcasing a finished website. Documentation improves your marketing results since it displays step-by-step processes on how you’ll develop the product.

The 3 Stages of Lightweight Documentation

Documentation can be light or heavy, depending on how much you want to include. In this section, we’ll discuss the three stages of design in lightweight UX documentation.

Research

The research stage helps you understand what users want. It helps you discover their interests, motivations, and experiences that could transform your design process. At this stage, you gather ideas that inform the kind of elements, features, and aspects you choose for your design.

To gain the most insight at this stage you need to focus more on what other people are saying. Though it might be tempting to want to come out with your idea, this may not deliver positive results in the end. For this reason, use the research stage to welcome experts, stakeholders, team members, and users.

Ask questions and collect the most data to understand better who you are designing for. To get the most out of the research stage, use interviews, surveys, or field studies to gather information. Remember that for success in this stage, you need empathy. Empathy allows you to be more human-centered and prevents you from making individual assumptions throughout the design process.

Design

This is the stage where you start generating your ideas. You already know what your users need and can now design products that deliver what they want. During the design stage, you can expand the research data to provide a comprehensive approach to the users’ problems.

The design stage always seems like a lot of work, but without it, you may find yourself backtracking later on in the final stages. Approach this stage as more of a problem/solution stage that brings many ideas to deliver something unique that users can embrace.

This stage consists of more than just getting your ideas on paper and moving to the next phase. It involves having excellent UX documentation that acts as a reference in future projects.

Usability Testing

Research and design are only two of the many things you need for proper documentation. You also need usability testing to determine if your strategies will fulfill your audiences’ needs. Though it appears at the end of our list, user testing is a continuous process. It should be carried out from when you start ideating your designs until the launch.

How Documentation Fits in the 3 Stages of Design

Documentation During the Research Stage

At this stage, you are filling in the blanks. You are carrying out a market analysis, fetching competitors’ data, and conducting user information. For excellent documentation at this stage, here’s what you can do;

Collect users survey

If you are looking to cover a broader scope of people, you’ll have to use a user survey to collect data. Surveys deliver a realistic perspective of documentation. They are useful for obtaining a qualitative approach to lightweight UX documentation.

Conduct users interviews

Users are the consumers of your product. By understanding what they are looking for in a design, you can measure the level of input in the design. Users’ interviews are also an ideation stage. With interviews, you can get ideas of what to discuss during a brainstorming activity.

Conduct interviews with stakeholders

There are three things that stakeholders help you put into perspective:

Business goals

User interests

Technological perspective

Stakeholders have an interest in the design. Whether professional or personal, they would want a design that delivers the most success. It’s for this reason that their opinions matter the most in your design process. Additionally, they’ll provide valuable insights that you can’t obtain from anywhere else.

So, how do you conduct stakeholder interviews?

First, you’ll need to identify stakeholders with interest in your product design. If, for example, you are creating web designs for eCommerce products, you’d want someone with know-how and interest in your project.

Next, come up with a list of questions. Pretend like you know absolutely nothing about the designs. This allows you to attain a different angle for all your projects’ questions. Finally, remember to document everything and analyze the responses before moving to the design stage.

Perform a competitive audit

If you want to understand how competitors are fairing in the documentation process, carry out a competitive audit. A competitive audit will show your areas of strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) in the design process. It offers information on how to research correctly and understand your findings before implementing the results.

Once you are done collecting the data, the next step is to display it so it’s understandable for anyone who comes across it. Here’s how you can document data during the research stage

Showcase user personas based on behavior. This includes segmenting them based on interests, demographics, and geographies. You can also have what motivates them and their expectations with your design.

Display a customers’ journey map. This is where you observe customers’ touchpoints during testing to put them in buyer personas. A customer journey map includes every place they visit before, during, and after engagement with your design team.

Indicate a customer’s action when they visit specific pages. This is more of an imaginary approach to a customer’s journey. At this stage, you imagine what users would do and outline how they would feel. This phase helps you understand how easy and fast it would be to work with your designs.

2. Documentation During the Design Stage

This phase involves coming up with the physical design itself. Documentation at this stage will influence most of the decisions in the final step. Some aspects you’ll have to document at this stage include:

Wireframes

This is an overview of your products’ structure. It guides the UX designers to know where every graphic, text, or concept should be placed once the design process begins.

Sitemaps

This is the architectural outline of your pages. It shows the relationship between pages and helps designers connect related aspects.

User flow

Once you have wireframes and sitemaps in place, you can create a chart displaying how users move around your pages. This will help create a design that users will find easy to use. It will also assist you in including shortcuts to enable fast access to pages your users interact with frequently.

Prototypes

This is a sample of the final design you wish to release for launching. It’s mostly used for usability testing. A prototype is necessary for testing. It identifies aspects of a design that need to change before it is released to the broader audience.

Sketches

They are the first idea of what you think the design should look like. You can share sketches with stakeholders, users, or team members to open conversations about the final design.

Mockups

Mockups involve the visual elements of your products. It includes all the graphics that shape a wireframe. They provide a high-fidelity definition of how the final design will look like.

3. Documentation During the User Testing Stage

Documentation during the usability phase ensures that your design delivers what users are looking for. It includes;

A plan

These are the procedures and goals that you’ll be testing. It includes the questions, time, and location for the tests. It also involves people who will take part in the process.

A description of what users should do during the test

This includes tasks and a script of what should take place during the test. It helps in moderating the test, so you are sure that all details necessary for successful testing are included.

A report with results from the test

This document shows the outcome of the tests. It’s essential to all members since it helps in the final outline of the design process. For future reference, ensure that the report is accessible and easy to interpret by everyone.

Wrapping It Up

A lot can be said about UX documentation. But if you are looking for a lighter way of documenting your design process, this guide will be a useful reference. In all this, remember to have a plan. Setting clear goals will ensure efficiency in your UX design processes.

If you are looking for specific participants for your research, reach out to our User Interview team. We are a company focused on finding and maintaining participants in the U.S and Canada.