Design process documentation is the written and visual record of how an interface came to be: the ideas you generated, the sketches and low-fidelity prototypes you tested, the reasoning behind each choice, the higher-fidelity versions you built, and the way all of this changed across iterations. In practice, a design document is not a scrapbook of pretty screens — it is an argument. It shows a reader what problem you were solving, what alternatives you considered, why you kept one and discarded others, and what evidence supported that call.
This matters in CEN3722 because your course project is judged largely through what you write about it. Graders, teammates, and future maintainers cannot watch you work, so your report must make the invisible parts visible: the discarded concepts, the trade-offs, the usability findings that forced a redesign. Clear documentation of design rationale is also what separates a defensible HCI decision from a personal preference.
The three videos below come from practicing designers and from the Nielsen Norman Group. As you watch, pay attention to the artifacts each one produces at every stage — diagrams, annotated prototypes, specification notes, explanation slides — and ask how you would capture that same artifact in a section of your own report. Also notice how each speaker explains a choice to someone who was not in the room; that framing is exactly what your rationale sections need.
A working product designer walks through her end-to-end process using the Double Diamond framework, moving through discovery, problem definition, ideation, and delivery. Based on its title and description, it is a project-style walkthrough that shows how a real design effort progresses rather than a purely theoretical lecture, and it acknowledges that the process varies from project to project. Expect to see the stages where concepts are generated and narrowed, and the artifacts that result from each phase.
It gives you a concrete, named structure (Double Diamond) for organizing the narrative of your design process section, which directly supports documenting concept generation and capturing design evolution across iterations.
This short Nielsen Norman Group video introduces three types of prototype specifications — element, functionality, and content — as a way to document the details of a prototype. It explains what each specification type captures and why written specs are needed alongside the prototype itself, since a visual artifact alone rarely communicates intended behavior. At under four minutes it is dense and directly practical.
NNgroup is a widely cited authority in usability, and this is the most directly on-topic piece for describing low- and high-fidelity prototypes in writing — it gives you vocabulary and categories you can use as headings in your own prototype documentation.
This video addresses what to do with a large, messy sandbox of ideas: how to organize design explorations and present them to others for feedback. Judging from the title and description, it covers selecting and grouping explorations, structuring them for an audience, and framing them so reviewers can respond productively rather than being overwhelmed by raw variations. It is aimed at the moment between generating many concepts and committing to one.
Presenting explorations for feedback is essentially the live version of writing design rationale, so this video models how to justify and compare alternatives — the core skill behind the concept generation and design rationale subtopics.
Together these videos trace the arc your module asks you to document. The Double Diamond walkthrough supplies an overall process narrative and the record of how a design evolved from problem to solution, which feeds the iteration history required by MO1. The exploration-organization video models how to select among alternatives and explain those choices to an audience, which is the habit behind MO3's requirement to justify decisions rather than merely report them. The NNgroup video on prototype specifications supplies precise, structured conventions for describing prototypes in writing, supporting both MO1's record of design decisions and MO2's emphasis on clear, professional technical reporting. Watch them with your own project document open and note which section each idea belongs in.
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.