Documenting a User Interface

Picture of a sample page Participatory design (and initial design in general) tends to be done at a low degree of resolution. The typical document consists of hand-drawn screens or mock-ups.

At some stage, the design must be converted to a format that is more formal, and better suited for use by developers and others. Moving from mock-up to a formal document encourages the design team to consider proposed solutions in more depth. Providing a formal specification also minimises the need for developers to second-guess design decisions.

You can download a sample User Interface Description in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format (File size: 47 KB).

To use this document as a template and modify it to suit your requirements, download the Word version (.doc; File size: 161 KB) or a ZIP file containing the RTF version (File size: 107 KB).

Download Adobe's free Acrobat Reader (TM) for PDF files

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