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What the Design QA process means for products and how to do it
Design QA is a tool to improve product quality and identify gaps of understanding between the designer and the other team members.
Design QA (Quality assurance) is an essential part of product development, is a process that helps to be sure that the design we created is implemented in the correct way on the product.
It is different from the normal QA process because it focuses more on the visual design itself and its functionality, and usually, a ux designer
would do it.
Not all teams include design QA as a part of their development process. This article will explain why design QA can be useful to your product and how to do it.
Why we need it and What it solved
As product designers, we are always looking for ways to make sure our products are high quality. Before we send them out to the developers, we do a design review with the team, involve the PM (product manager) in our decisions, and conduct a usability test.
After the design phase is complete, we send all the assets to the developers and wait to see the final results.
Sometimes, after the developers finish the implementation, we see the result and discover a gap between the design and the execution.
It can be because the developer used a different font size or the flow wasn’t implemented well, or just an interaction that doesn’t fit 100% to the screen.
The design quality assurance process fills this gap. It allows the designer to review the implementation and spot gaps between the design and the implementation. It may also turn up errors in the design.
What causes these errors:
Before we address how to fix the errors we find, let’s take a step back and discuss why they are occurring.
From my point of view, three main topics will cause us to find errors.
- The communication between the developer and the designer is bad.
- Design errors.
- The developer missed some…
