Documenting design decisions: template

For whom is design documentation

• Safe team
• Future Safe team employees
• Management
• Other teams at Gnosis

The purposes of design documentation

• Reference and context: the team understands the reasoning behind design decisions, developers have clear requirements on what to build. Other teams at Gnosis can learn and replicate successful decisions.
• Future reference: the team can revisit design decisions later and reuse them for future features.
• New team members: future employees can inform themselves on the reasoning behind past decisions.
• Management buy-in: stakeholders see where the team effort and time went.

Requirements to design documentation

• This documentation is feature-based. When the feature is released, the design decisions are considered final. Alternative versions can also be included.
• There should be enough context. The documentation should be self-explanatory. New team members should understand the logic behind the decisions.
• Data should be organised by platform, release, date, there should be links to other sources and artifacts (Github issues, meeting notes, Slack discussions, Invision, Zeplin, Dovetail, Miro).
• Data should be updated after the user feedback or user test results appear (was the decision eventually successful or not). Changes should be documented.

Links: provide links to all available materials and artifacts (Github issues, meeting notes, Slack discussions, Dovetail projects, Trello workshops, Invision & Figma prototypes, Zeplin screens, Miro boards).

Platform: is it for web or mobile, or both?

App version: provide versions where this feature was released (for all platforms).

Which problem do we solve?

How does the feature fit into the product and larger product decisions?

What are the metrics and KPIs we will be measuring for this feature?

Is there user research or quantitative data informing decisions made here?

Screens

Main design decisions

User tests – insights, changes after user tests

Changes after release, metrics