Traceability in Interaction Design Documentation: An Approach to Integrating Design Rationale into Design Systemsprehensible Design System Interface

The documentation of design decisions is a common practice across various disciplines to
capture the decision-making process and promote reflection on the decisions made. In the
field of interaction design, design systems are becoming an increasingly prominent tool for
documenting design decisions. Among other things, this is intended to establish a shared
understanding of the design language of a project among the designers involved. In practice,
such documentation tends to focuses on the current version, which provides limited insight
into the underlying design process. This research project explores the extent to which the
incorporation of design rationale into design systems can facilitate the traceability of design
decisions. Moreover, a template for recording design rationales was developed to provide
guidance throughout the process. The approach was refined within two iterations and based
on feedback from designers from two interview studies. The evaluation demonstrates that the
developed concept makes an initial contribution to traceability in design systems. The design
rationale template provides designers with a framework and standardizes the documentation
process of design decisions. Nevertheless, the developed foramt cannot be applied to all types
of decisions. Consequently, future research should investigate how the concept can be adapted
to enable its applicability in other design contexts.