Regarding QA: I'd say yes, you want to be clear for QA. But finding the right balance between "explicit" and "concise" is key.
A cautionary tale: Once upon a time at my company we wrote air-tight docs. The docs were so explicit they left *nothing* to the imagination, and QA straight lifted them as test plans. You'd think this would be a good thing. But it wasn't. Our docs became very long and very detailed. A single product might have 700 pages of documentation. As the design morphed during production (as it always does based on user test results, etc) it became impossible to keep the docs 100% up to date. We tried hard to do it. Everybody was working crazy hours, nights and weekends -- just to update the docs! Then we hit the QA cycle. Our poor testers had to comb through 700 pages. Every time they hit a discrepancy between design and documentation, bam they had to log a bug. Even if the design essentially made sense. Then you're looking at 1000s of bugs (as a designer or project manager) and sorting them into "doc bugs" versus "real bugs". Then there's the happy fun of going back and updating 700 pages of docs. When really, you don't want to even DEAL with the docs --- you want to spend your energy on building the best product. So, with too much focus on documentation, everybody's productivity is lowered and dev costs go through the roof. So, we've changed policy. Now we make sure to be concise. We are as detailed as possible wherever necessary. And we explain the GOAL of the design. Our Design Docs are radically shorter these days. It saves everyone time and money. And so far, we're managing to keep clarity on the designs just fine. For the record, I should say I work for LeapFrog toys. So we're not building web sites. We're building interactive books, games, toys, etc. Still, we have similar documentation issues to anyone creating digital products. Perhaps it's not as much of an issue for web based products. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=26800 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
