I’m the leader of my development team, consisting of:
- Back end developers (PHP and API’s /Frameworks, CMS backend, server side technologies)
- Front-end developers (JavaScript with APIs, client side technologies)
- HTML/CSS Ninjas that work closely with the graphics ppl
- other staff related to development process
Lately, projects have many requirements related to user interface, lots of them comming from the graphics / creativity ppl and the user itself. The requirements sound like “when the user hovers the logo, the letters should scatter in horizontal opposite directions, and the logo should fade-in while moving up in a smooth movement animation where the speed decreases while the logo reaches the target”. It’s my duty to document these requirements to send them to the front-end developers.
I was wondering if there’s any way to document such things in a way that’s good for everyone. Lately, describing animations and such has been a pain, and the documents are good for nothing.
My enterprise is in a position where the creativity staff and the javascript staff can communicate with each other directly, but we are having trouble monitoring the process, estimating times / effort and filling up metrics.
Can any one give some idea to document such things? I’m sure it’s not only happening to us… I’m loooking for an organized / structured way to make a document / whatever that I can give the javascript ppl (along with the HTML /CSS that make up the web page), that they will surely understand without even asking the creativity ppl directly, allowing them to start working immediately without further communications.
How about create primitive mockups of the intended animations, say, in PowerPoint or flash? The creativity team wouldn’t need any programming skills to use those, and nothing brings graphical stuff better across then graphics. Even pictures showing the desired start and end state of animation, maybe with supporting arrows etc., would probably be much more helpful than text (or, at least, text itself).