Design Tip #10 for Creating Multi-Touch Experiences - Prepare to Share

Our last installment of the series "10 Things You Need To Know When Creating Multi-Touch Experiences"
After years of enabling our customers to build interactive content, we've identified what we formally call "10 Things You Need To Know When Creating Multi-Touch Experiences". Informally, each tip represents an area of focus whose insight can make the difference between a successful and a failed deployment.
Design Tip #10 - Prepare to Share
Are you going it alone? Unlikely. Collaboration is grease on the wheels of productivity. But even if you don't currently expect assistance, work like you will. Make sure your project is consumable by anyone who will have access to your designs. You want the hand-off to be an accelerator, not a brake.
Name everything
Establish specific, descriptive naming conventions for your media. For example, shame on you if naming your images “Image1”, “Image2”, …. It should be fairly obvious how graphic media maps to in-design elements. And be consistent. If you name the button btn_Exit in one scene, use the same name in all other scenes.
Incorporate notes
Document your thought process, cataloging decisions made and approaches taken. Reverse engineering - trying to figure out how a particular goal was achieved - can be quite difficult. And you won’t always be present or accessible, nor is is safe to assume your colleague or client can guess your intentions. Record your thoughts, both in the project itself and outside in a knowledge base.
Use templates if possible
When possible, turn your ideas into repeatable templates. In essence, you're codifying lessons learned and best practices, making it easier for you and your colleagues to start work for a new client.Even better, time-to-completion is improved because of the jump you have over starting from scratch. The result is scale, your team's ability to get more done with the same number of personnel in the same amount of time.
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