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With fewer QA experts, are designers in charge of product quality? Tips to enhan...

 1 year ago
source link: https://uxdesign.cc/quality-assurance-in-design-who-tested-this-b3ca28410769
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Quality assurance in design: Who tested this?

Product quality is everyone’s responsibility. But with fewer dedicated QA specialists, it’s unclear who’s truly accountable. And with UX designers now handling more testing, one has to wonder: Is this strategy effective? Are we setting designers up to succeed? Is the product better?

A Happy Path Design QA approved sticker with a GEN AI image of a path going through a forest and mountains

Mock gen AI sticker of a Happy Path testing approval

I often stumble upon the “Design QA” term within development teams. I also see it popup in industry articles, such as “The importance of Design QA in digital product design” (Eddy, 2018) and “ The QA Process in UX design” (Delise, 2019), to mention a few. While both articles underline the importance of the UX practice of taking ownership of the live product experience beyond mockups, they also recommend that “Design QA” needs to be a process task in product development.

Adding a new step in the development can be exciting. However, it might not always work well. As we see fewer QA specialists, Product Designers inherit some of the leftover tasks. Labeling this as “QA Design,” creates a false sense of reassurance, unwarranted as the testing is superficial. Such a label implies that designers are the new owners of quality, and only have the tools to do it, aka “design eyes/sesibility”. Ultimately, the QA is a team responsibility, but design is the only one accountable.

But let us step back and look at the context. Shall we unpack how did design practices get into this position?

From QA as a function in a team…

A few years back, I led a multidisciplinary app development team. We empowered our QA analyst, let us call them Oli, with the ultimate power: stopping a launch. We internally named the position “Guardian of Quality”. Oli held the team accountable for the product’s quality standard.

How did they do it? Oli built a repository of testing scenarios covering functional, smoke, penetration, unit, regression, etc. They developed and maintained a debt backlog and used it to create a “Stability score” based on severity, priority, and recurrence. They checked for new comments in app stores for blind spots.


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