As a Information Architect and/or Experience Designer you usually involve in the Functional Specs writing too. Thats how they rock!

In my recent experience I noticed few things related to the Functional Specs, they are dry and boring, they won’t offer the “interactivity” or “energy” related to the project.

As per our human nature (remember developers are humans too, pun intended), we enjoy a good movie, novel or any short stories. So why not inject that idea in to our Functional Specs for our project. This is in my opinion a superb way to keep the reader (client, project manager, developer, even investors!) enhcanted with the project and this is the power of “Story”. Explaining the shopping cart process in a story mode is always good for mind, won’t give you the “pressure” and won’t make you “sleepy” while reading it. For instance here is what a typical Shopping Cart Procedure explained in the Functional Specs:

Typical Specs:

As seen on FireBird CMS Functional Specs, you will notice the typical functional specs are just a collection of objects, for instance:

Ecommerce and Online Product Catalogue Features

4.1. Product Catalogue

• List products (Thumb, Title, Small Details, Price, RRP, View, Add to Cart)
• Pagination
• Search by Title and Description

Now imagine if we can explain this in a “Story Mode” which I think is the best way to explain, even the non-techie people will understand.

“Product Catalogue: Shopping need catalog too, the best way to present the catalog is by introducing the User with the list of product with the Image of the Product, brief description and the price, if necessary we will allow user to add the product right from the Catalog to the Shopping Cart. Every user has their own prefrences we will provide them a “Pagination” feature, this will help them to paginate the catalog according to their need, we will allow them to paginate the product by viewing only 10 products per page, or 20 or 50 at max.

We will give them the ability to filter the result according to the keywords they are interested in”

Now see the big difference here, I am sure there are certain experts out there who follow that “Story-mode” religiously. But mostly things are explained in the tech-world, especially the Funtional Specs (which they usually treat as a bible of the project, no doubt about it, it is the REAL MEAT)

So the point here I would like to present is… The superb way to present the Functional Specs is using the power of Story, which includes all the detail related to a project in such a way that it won’t become only the “Developers Note” but also shared among the Clients and the Project Owners.