Specifications (technical documentation) for website design

Defining technical specification

It is a document which includes a collection of necessities that a product must comply. Things that do not satisfy all the properties, meaning, does not meet the criteria, is often known by the phrase «non-conforming». Specifications are useful for the purpose of issuing a contract to purchase equipment or services. Technical specification requirements are established to enforce the contract.

Specifications For Website Design

Why it is necessary to develop your project specifications?

Designers, developers, and managers generally manage in a tight time frame together with leading several projects simultaneously. In addition, the team has to instantly offer feedback to its customers or clients. The slightest change of the user interface’s context or deal with the product at the user interaction level should be recorded in the documentation so that designers and devs have the latest product information.

Writing technical documentation significantly reduces the probability of team facing serious problems, bringing design to life. Guide presence is not as important as its relevance. Irrelevant or contradictory instructions can leave heads spinning of the most experienced developer: he has to guess how to correctly determine one or another element of the user interface in the code. It takes too much time and workforce and becomes an endless headache of the team (especially if there is a complex application is being developed).

Development Specifications For Website Design

What problems arise without specification?

Essentially, any application is developed by a team that has designers, devs & project managers. Every team member has their own specific needs.

Problems developers face

After having prepared a layout, the designer delivers that layout to the developer. Often it looks like just a PNG export and preparing a specification that has every necessary annotation. Preparing a specification of the huge task can be an immense headache, because the design may alter regularly. Therefore, traditional (static) style guides become outdated almost instantly.

The specification preparing is terribly tedious, besides whenever it is done by hand, it takes much time. In addition, each designer prepares it in different ways. Finally, many designers are more engaged in the preparation of specifications, rather than “construction”. All the time spent by a designer on developing the documentation is lost time, and indeed, it could be used to improve the existing layout or start a new one.

Development Technical Documentation For Website Design

Provided that saving designers time and nerves is crucial to you — just confirm that they won’t be engaged in preparing specifications.

Developers’ problems

Studying the specification is not a holiday. Devs mostly have to get clarification from designers the info about the details that are not well described in the specification, or as a bad case scenario, use photo editing software to gain this info.

Mostly, they must adjust all lengths of the properties according to the platform conditions by hand. Often they do not get sufficient meticulous data on visual design — they are forced to evaluate the details, and this leads to visual discrepancies. Even after successfully applying original design, most probably the developer is going to change and he has to relive circles of the hell again. This approach is inflexible.

Computer Specifications For Web Design

Manager’s problems

Project manager’s duty covers organizing utmost efficient processes, and first of all, it concerns the cooperation among every team member. Every team member has to equally be aware of the changes in the design. Many projects create distributed teams, this forces the manager to form one common way of conversation.

The manager gets the opportunity to be aware of the most recent condition of the product via the specification development. Managers need to always check the process of design and create the possibility to review any alterations in one place, easily compare how different design versions look like and discuss them in real time.

Specification Development

How does preparing a website design specification solve these problems?

Development specifications for website design cover determining the size of elements, their position, color schemes, fonts, the distance between elements and many other attributes and object properties. Each design element carries a characteristics list that must be taken into account and recorded in the specification.

We demand a link between designing and developing — a mechanism that would simplify and accelerate the preparation of specifications & product development in general while ensuring that the designer, developer, manager eliminate the eternal question: “Where can I see the updated design development? «.

Fortunately, KATASIS Company can create such tools. They use Photoshop or Sketch layouts and automatically prepare specifications for developers. These specifications include code snippets and graphics (icons together with images). Tools also let to follow up alteration among versions of the design.

Write Specification

The functions of the tools to create technical documentation

We create collaboration tools for user interface designers and frontend developers and are focused to convert a layout from Photoshop or Sketch into code. You just need to download the design layout, then the tools will turn it into a specification and a style guide that is going to be adapted according to your platform’s needs.

Our tools let you to:

  • study the design created in Sketch or Photoshop, it is not necessary to use initial programs and rapidly get the dimensions in accordance with the platform for which the development is being conducted;
  • get all the required design components, like images and icons, together with all the properties of objects (fonts, colors, and sizes);
  • export resource files for any elements, even if it is text, button or anything else;
  • send comments or memos to the members of the team directly in the current layout.

Specs For Designing A Website

Development of specs for web design by KATASIS

Our web studio proposes to develop the necessary tools for the most productive work of designers and devs. Thanks to our web products, the entire team can collaborate in a single space where all element sizes, colors, and distances between elements freely adapt to each of the team members. You no longer need to prepare a huge description of these details — the tools do all this work automatically.

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