UX for Business

Quick Detour: Documents

Why I Haven’t Focused on Documents in This Book

You may have noticed that there has been almost nothing about how to draw wireframes or make clickable prototypes or PowerPoint presentations or site maps or customer journey maps or any of that stuff. Do I really expect you to take this book as a guide for doing valuable UX in real companies without any documents?!

Yeah, kind of.

I am not saying you don’t need to make documents. You will make plenty of them. But you can also search online about how to make most UX documents in 30 minutes or less. There is no “right way” to draw a customer journey map.

However, the content of those documents is highly important! And that has been the subject of most of this book. The rest of this book is all about who you are making documents for. The content and the audience of your documentation—regardless of what form or style it might take—is what matters.

Personally, I see documents as a form of internal communication, not design work.

Everybody Focuses on Documents!

Another reason I haven’t gone all in on documentation is because everybody else teaches documents when they teach UX. UX documents are so easy to learn and teach that even the laziest of UX teachers will spend lots of time teaching documentation. Then they skip everything important.

UX documents feel important because they are the part that all of your colleagues will see. And in a way, that does make them very important. But remember: documents are ...