You might be familiar with the idea of an Architectural Decision Record, where the goal is to record both a decision and the underlying reasons to help clarify and shape the design of a project. I'm proposing we implement the same concept for User Experience.
This is not a new thing, really. If you've viewed the Material Design Foundation content, there's information about layout, color, shapes, hierarchy, motion, and more. This content provides a direction and a set of reasons for it.
Your company may have these kinds of rules and reasons for your own interfaces. Most of us don't have Google-level spending, though, so presenting content like the Material UI project is likely out of the question.
In your organization, you may have information shared amongst the UX team but not disseminated out to Developers; or the bare decisions, lacking reasons, may be shared. Both of these create an "information vacuum" where developers may pester the UX team for small, potentially repetitive presentation or interaction rules. Alternately, they may independently make assumptions and create unexpected variations.
"I know the product card expands in 350ms on the search page, but how fast should it expand on the shopping cart?"
"What about the promoted products?"
"I assumed the shopping cart dropdown would be faster than the others."
Making this information available to the developers can free the User Experience team to focus on more complex issues. Developers can exercise reasonable judgement based on not just the rules but the reasons and produce more consistent interfaces with fewer "round trips" to UX for confirmation.
Also, in the age of AI-assisted development, making these resources available in a machine-readable format can improve the ability for coding, review, and validation tools to ensure compliance with the intended UX recommendations.
AI Implementation Support
There is an initial cost of setup and documentation to produce such content, and your team may understandably consider that initial time investment too expensive right now.
However, shards of this information are constantly being delivered in email, chat, online meetings, or documentation for various team members. Modern AI tools may be able to extract proposed decisions and reasons from these various sources, substantially reducing the collection and preparation time for delivering value.
All of this still requires Real Human™ review and approval, and even if the UX team might initially balk at delivering AI-generated or AI-assisted content, being able to share these rules and reasons will reduce the daily load on the team members, putting them in a position to iterate and improve the process and documentation.
Summary
A consistent User Experience is a core deliverable of any product. XDRs offer long-term value and the documentation distributes knowledge more evenly, providing shared resources to create and confirm understanding and support better distribution of decision making.
Ensure consistency with documentation rather than depending on team members to reliably communicate and deliver perfect consistency. And, if applicable, use AI to mine for existing decisions that are not documented in a commonly-accessible location to reduce the effort needed to start sharing your XDRs.
And, as with any good product or policy, be prepared to iterate on the interface or information to suit both the team and the desired outcomes.
Feedback
Does your team have internal design language and patterns? Do they meet your needs for development, quality review, and implementation? Do they communicate their own reasons and limitations? What kind of content do you think could be most valuable in an XDR?
Top comments (0)