3 Ways Confluence Makes Your Design Documentation More Valuable

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Design documentation can add real value to an organization—if it’s done right.

Sadly, most is either too detailed or not detailed enough. Too detailed means that developers and other stakeholders don’t read it properly. Not detailed enough means that people are left with questions.

In both scenarios, there’s unnecessary back-and-forth, misunderstandings about design intent, and delays getting features released. 66% of design and development teams think poor design documentation is the main cause of design-to-dev inefficiency, according to the 2023 DesignOps Benchmarking Report.

In this article, we’ll look at ways of creating design documentation that actually works.

What is design documentation?

Design documentation is a structured record of information about a specific design project, such as a new screen, feature, or process within an app. It covers the problem being addressed, the objective of the new design, and how it should be implemented. It can include a wide range of content, from end user profiles to roles and responsibilities to finished designs.

Why is design documentation important?

Design documentation serves several purposes within the product development life cycle:

Facilitates design-to-dev handoff

Design documentation is used at the design handoff stage, to provide developers with the specs and context they need to implement a completed design. If the documentation doesn’t include everything the devs need, they will either come back with lots of questions or code something that doesn’t fit what the designer intended. The better the documentation, the smoother the handoff.

Aligns all stakeholders

Design documentation aims to act as a single source of truth for the project, so that all stakeholders know what’s being done, why it’s being done, who’s involved, how to measure success, and more. It prevents different team members from interpreting the build differently, creating process discrepancies that could affect the usability of a product. It’s also great for transparency and for letting everyone catch up at their own pace.

Informs future projects

It’s easy to forget things said or decided in meetings, and important information gets lost if it’s not properly documented. Design documentation provides a history of design decisions and the rationale behind specific iterations. This makes it an essential point of reference when embarking on a future design project.

Why is design documentation difficult to get right?

Although it is hard to write, quality often isn’t the problem with design documentation. Rather, it’s that designers don’t share it properly. They create the documentation without team involvement, then hit publish and hope people use it. Which they don’t.

Design documentation can be nicely written, formatted, and illustrated, but if it’s not used for the purposes it was made for, it’s all for naught. The worst documentation is the sort that gets ignored.

3 tips for making better design documentation

1. Use Confluence, not Figma

Designers often attempt to document their designs in Figma, particularly for handing over to devs. While Figma is trying to make their tool appeal to devs (e.g. with Figma ‘dev mode’), it’s still a tool built for designers, not devs. Since it’s chaotic and unwieldy for many devs, it’s even more so for stakeholders like marketers and senior managers.

Moreover, Figma’s structureless canvases aren’t conducive to writing long-form content. Confluence is much more appropriate because it’s designed for written content and has all the features you need for it, from extensive formatting and collaborative capabilities to full page history.

Importantly, there are ways to integrate Confluence with Figma so that you can embed draft, final, and updated Figma designs on Confluence pages. Confluence users will be able to view and download designs without logging in to Figma.

Most fundamental is that Confluence is for everyone. Figma is likely to be inaccessible to most of the team—why would a support person need a Figma license? So an already established info-sharing environment is going to be a much more effective tool for aligning all stakeholders.

2. Encourage participation

People care more about things they’ve been involved in from the outset. If you use your design documentation as a means of gathering feedback on your designs, people are more likely to pay attention to it. It’s a good idea to share documentation with the team even before you’ve mocked up any designs. At this stage, the documentation simply outlines the designer’s objective and the problem to be solved in order to get ideas and insights from others. Keep sharing updated documentation as your designs come together, and as they change.

Confluence is ideal for this because you can interact with team members using comments and @mentions, collaboratively edit pages, and create links between your pages and others people’s.

Moreover, if your design documentation is centralized in Confluence, that makes it easy to involve other teams such as marketing and support in the design handoff process. The Clear View Method for Design Handoff promotes handing over designs to everyone, not just developers, as well as regular meetings and check-ins with all teams throughout the life of the project. Good design documentation should facilitate and support these interactions, keeping stakeholders aligned and making sure designs are continuing to meet user needs.

3. Sometimes minimal documentation is perfect

Design documentation in Confluence is good for big or complex design projects, such as a new login process. But you don’t necessarily need full documentation for minor user experience (UX) improvements such as rolling out a new button design or adding dark mode functionality.

Long-form documentation can be overkill if it’s created for the sake of it, wasting both the creator’s time and the reader’s. It also makes it less likely that future documentation will be used properly.

If you use Jira, a simple Jira ticket could function as your design document. Simply add the things devs need at handoff, such as context and acceptance criteria, to the issue description. And if you integrate Figma with Jira, you can embed a ready-for-implementation Figma design in the Jira ticket, which your devs can access without a Figma license.

Don’t eschew documentation entirely though. Even the smallest project should be documented, because a chat in an office or on a video call doesn’t provide designers and developers with a history of changes to the product to be referenced later. This could lead to redundancies and duplication in future work.

Key takeaways

Design documentation plays a critical role in the product development life cycle and bridges the gap between designers and other teams. It’s especially valuable for fostering good developer-designer collaboration.

However, documenting designs directly in tools like Figma can complicate design handoff and exclude non-designer stakeholders. Using Confluence makes it easier to get everyone aligned on designs, and treating documentation as a communication tool helps keep people engaged and reduces unnecessary back-and-forth later.

That said, not every project requires extensive documentation. For small changes, a Jira ticket may be enough. It’s the bigger projects that would benefit from a more detailed write-up. The key is finding the right balance: writing things down to avoid misalignment without overloading the team.

If you’d like to create design documentation in Confluence or Jira with embedded Figma frames (viewable without a Figma account), try Figma for Confluence Pro or Figma for Jira Pro free for one month.