Reporting on design processes and design specifications
From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase
Reporting the design process and design specifications of a design are a category of research questions that aim to provide detailed documentation and reports of how, why, and with what specifications a product was designed.
Definition
Research questions about the reporting of the design process and specifications of a product are aimed at providing information and evidence about the actual process of design so that insights may be gained and lessons learned from the process of design. Insights can be used to alter the design process during the next iteration or improvement of the product, or to help design teams in general through sharing what worked and what didn't work.
This type of research question is used to evaluate the process of design. When combined with other categories of research questions, it can also provide useful contexts for how and why the product achieved its goals and whether people learned from the product.
This set of research questions is different in comparison to the other categories, as it does not seek to measure individual or product outcomes or variables. Instead, this type of research question investigates the contexts and rationale surrounding design decisions made by the team, identifies the issues that were faced by the team and how the team handled them, and highlights opportunities for improvement and changes to design processes based on the actual work and tasks performed by the design team.
Common Research Questions
In this category of research questions, the actual questions typically take one or more of the following general forms:
- Were there any parts of the written design specifications or plans that were not achievable by the team, and why not?
- What is the narrative or story of how the product was created, from the start to the finish?
- What were the main things that the design team found during the initial analysis of the project?
- What challenges occurred during the design of the product and how were these addressed?
- Did any significant changes need to be made during the design, and why did these occur?
- Did any new information or findings arise during the design or development phases that required a change to the product plan?
- Were there challenges with implementation that were not anticipated? How were these handled?
- Did the scope of the project change, and what were the reasons for the changes if so?
- How did the project stay on budget and within available resource requirements?
- How and why the design team change over the duration of the project?
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