What Does Design QA Mean? What Does Design QA Mean?
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What Does Design QA Mean?

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Project Management
14 Oct 2022
7 min read
Update:

Design Quality Assurance is also one of the designing phases, the process of reviewing the design of a product or its feature after it’s been developed. Here a designer may compare the originally designed feature to the developed version and capture design, interaction, and user experience errors to eliminate them. Design quality assurance guarantees the quality of the product before the launch.

What Does Design QA Mean?
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Why Design QA is Important?

Why doing it? To be precise, design QA assists both the designers and developers align their work and solving problems together, and learn from each other a lot. Developers will be able to understand the importance of user experience for the product, and at the same time, designers will know about lots of technical limitations that the development team is often facing while developing the UI.

QA testing will also be necessary to check all the system processes and website or app functions for stability and quality of work. QA is often considered only a part of the QC (quality control) process, but in fact, it has a huge meaning for the whole product maintenance process in the future.

Functionality check

Basically, design testers check navigation, product search, and checkout functions, authentication forms and their input fields, and other elements like flyout menus, etc. Specialists write reports on all problems if they find any.

Usability score

Testers check the convenience of the website for users, ease of navigation, and search for the necessary information. The goal is to evaluate how clear and easy the resource is to use which is a must for incredible UX/UI quality.

Stress testing

Testing the site under load is mainly performed using special software. The goal is to check how stable and correct the website will work under a given load.

User interface testing

Checking the interface for stable operation, compliance with a chosen style, and modern requirements for sites is also a must. Cross-browser compatibility of all pages is also checked.  Periodic QA testing is important to ensure the resource runs smoothly and prevents major outages.

Pentests

In the case there’s been an app developed, you will need a penetration test. High-technology mobile apps and websites are in no way without security issues. That is why there are many top-notch pentest-tools for handling multiple workflows that allow detection and elimination, as well as prevention of any web security attacks there.

Benefits of Design QA

Testing design apart from all the above mentioned ensures the collection of statistical data and their entry into documents created as part of the QC process. Quality Assurance ensures the correctness and predictability of the QA design process.

Through testing, we can determine whether all the parts and the product as a whole are working as we expected them to. Figuratively, we check out the interface or the whole product if it is made from the right materials, using the necessary techniques and tools, or not.

The task of QA is to ensure compliance at all stages of the design of our brainchild with defined quality standards, starting from planning and creating drawings and ending with the assembly of the finished website or application. That is, attention is paid to the quality of the object even before the creation of the object itself. So, the qa may not just solve the problem, but rather prevent any issue before the product goes to the market.

Challenges of Design QA

Averagely, designers may face at least 5 common challenges related to qa and need to avoid or accept them in their working process to achieve great quality results.

Unreliable environment

The truth is that a quality analyst team or QAs need the right setup and environment for testing the software. If short of time under the deadline pressure or any other inconveniences the process may fail as well.

Sprint planning errors

Saving time at the planning stage usually results in a protracted correction phase. According to a Gartner study, the release of every fourth project is delayed due to the need to make additional adjustments in the final phase.

Product release slowdown

When you are preparing to launch your design product, one important step is to transfer your product to your contract manufacturer, as with the white label apps, for example. When there are some delays, the quality assurance needs to be corrected as well.

Meager collaboration between tester & developer

Well, these guys sometimes don’t get along well. But the synergy between Developers and Testers is the key to the success of any software project. However, the difference in mindset is an obstacle and compromise is inevitable.

Last-moment changes to requirements

What can ever be more challenging than this? When requirements are changed you evaluate the change and understand the impact in scope, schedule, and budget over again. This is as if starting everything over from scratch which may be quite disturbing.

Tips for Setting up a Design QA Process

Design QA may be quite a simple process. All you need is to ask the developers to get access to an effective test environment and start testing the screens, styles and so on. You may also apply some scenarios that can reflect the user tasks before you begin to test the design. It will guide you. Mainly, in a design you may test three key issue types:

1.     Start with the visual problems

Sometimes the developer may lack certain information and that s why did not pay attention to the visual aspects (e.g., wrong color), etc. or visual problems may occur because your design software doesn’t reflect 100% of the final product. Here you check out the correspondence between the visual component to the functional part. If it’s okay, then you pass over to the function checkout.

2.     Test functional issues

Here you may usually find minor or major interaction errors or actions that are not implemented well and of course some other bugs (e.g., a menu that opens up automatically every 15 seconds or blinking elements, etc). these will be the mistakes we must avoid and eliminate.

3.     Check general bugs

And finally, it’s normal to face the general bugs that are not related to the user story you’re testing and fix them too.

Also, apply the best test design techniques, rules, and design qa approaches that may help you create good tests and automate the process. They help designers to test, not just moving from page to page, but explaining why we enter certain values and what specific values ​​we need to enter to achieve great results and the highest quality of the product design.

Conclusion

Understanding the importance of design QA in the development of websites and applications comes to the forefront. Initially, the culture of quality assurance is being mastered by companies that produce a product for their customers, so QA has become essential even for minor product design projects.

Nowadays, both large product companies and small IT departments that create their own applications apply QA not to risk their reputation with every new product launch. Therefore, concern for quality is becoming more and more important for any mobile app design company that wants to develop and launch products in a competitive market.

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