One of the most important things to get right is to understand why you are documenting and how to do it most effectively. Getting your team onboard with a consistent set of practice is the best way to do that. I’m going to outline some best practices here and encourage these to be adapted and iterated on as needed.
<aside> 💡 When you’re making games, a designer’s job is always to think about the audience and their needs and craft a delightful experience. I offer that if you think of the audience of your documentation in the same way, you will create more effective design documentation.
</aside>
And also remember that the best documents are accessible and inclusive. This means that team members with reading disabilities and ESL individuals can find the information they need quickly. Keep your text CONCISE and rigorously use good formatting, colours, icons and images to guide your reader to the information they need.
All design documentation will be captured within the design database. This is so that the entirety of a project can be found in a “single source of truth” that is highly searchable.
Documents should use tags liberally which can then relink this database and filter it in unique ways so that you can display only what you need, where you need it.
Use colours for headers and give document types (ie. feature designs) their own emoji that you can associate with a type. This way things are easier to use/read and scan. Different people parse information differently and while text can help many, the additional use of icon and colour can go far.
<aside> 💡 Pro Tip: Be consistent with the colours and icons you use. For instance use one icon for feature designs 📝every time you write one, and another icon for pages associated with UX 👥.
</aside>
There are a ton of powerful tools in Notion for writing clean and consistent documentation. Learn to use them all. A lot of them can be accessed by typing a / and then browsing the list that appears.
It’s important to be as consistent as possible in the way that you use each of these, so make sure that you come up with a template or formatting example for yourself and your team to work with.
Here are a few of my favourite:
Use headers like crazy. Separating and calling out important information at a glance is critical to being able to scan a document quickly.