The Design SpecificationConveying the Details of the Design

The Design Specification ”Conveying the Details of the Design

Once the vision clips have been made and the call flow has been finalized, the designer needs to flesh out and annotate the rest of the design details. These expressions of the design are collected in the Design Specification. The Design Specification needs to be clear, thorough, well thought out, and specific. This is the document programmers will use to implement the design.

There is no official format to follow in creating a Design Specification, but I recommend the following five sections that cover the following areas.

Goal of the Section	Potential Document Manifestation
To give an overview of the document	A short paragraph that describes who should read this document and the purpose of the document, particularly as it relates to other technical documents that will be produced as part of the total effort.
To summarize what the document contains and how it will express the design	This may include a list describing the sections of the document such as document change history, aesthetics, and a reduction of relevant caller profile information from the requirements specification, as well as notes about the conventions used to textually express the design.
To provide examples of how the final version of the design will work	This can be in the form of sample call scripts or descriptions.
To illustrate a detailed, visual representation of how the overall systemwill work functionally	This section can be a series of diagrams that range from an overview to a granular level illustrating the connections and paths that the caller may take through the application.
To show state (or turn of the dialogue) descriptions	A complete, comprehensive view of how the system will work in each state (each time the computer asks a question) ”providing enough detail so that a developer could easily program from it and so that a nondeveloper can understand the essence of that state.