UI specs should capture the following pieces of data: consistent terminology, pixel-level measurements, annotated screenshots (see prior post on how to create accurate images for specs), behavioral descriptions beyond the obvious or “for free” stuff, with cross-references where appropriate and useful between depedent specs.<\/p>\n
Tables and spreadsheets do NOT make for good spec content or layouts as they tend to be hard to read.<\/p>\n
Indeed, specs should be considered “designed artifacts”, not simply last minute or post-mortem writing thrown together at the end of a prototyping phase. Per schedules, the spec writing should occur somewhat in parallel, with engagement with the spec writer and devs, QA, UI designer, prototyper, etc.<\/p>\n
Chunking and spacing the text and imagery properly is necessary to achieve that delicate balance of creating a document that is easily scannable and comfortable\/inviting to read at length. Extensive prose text is not recommended. Avoid “should”, “could”, “would”, and any explanations\/rationale–this is not a defense but a statement of what is to be. In effect, a recipe or cookbook so that if a disaster wiped out the company, then a remote dev team can rebuild the product from the specs (presuming that the documents are backed up somewhere!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
UI specs should capture the following pieces of data: consistent terminology, pixel-level measurements, annotated screenshots (see prior post on how to create accurate images for specs), behavioral descriptions beyond the obvious or “for free” stuff, with cross-references where appropriate and useful between depedent specs. Tables and spreadsheets do NOT make for good spec content or … Continue reading “On UI specs…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practical-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghostinthepixel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}