When you are one have a design made for your website, shop, portal or app, there is often a rock-solid story behind the choices that have been made. There is a reason why the headings on the blog have a certain color. There is a reason why the photos on a portfolio item are in a certain order. And there is a reason why the font is larger in one place than in another. The design team makes well-considered choices that all lead to that one goal: a good experience for the user, possibly coupled with the highest return.
Over time, as you develop more and more features for your site, people sometimes forget why certain things on the site were designed the way they were. Perhaps the original design team has been replaced. Or were you forced to work very quickly by very tight deadlines. “It looks good enough, right??!” is also sometimes said. Inconsistencies may then arise in the design of your site, or “design debt”.
Design debt is the negative impact of interim additions and changes to your website on the consistency and the right look and feel of your design and UX.
Design QA (quality assurance) in the fight against design debt
There is a solution to keep your design good, consistent and correct over time, and that is to introduce “design QA” into your workflow. Where your workflow normally goes from design to development, testing and launching, you take one more step between development and testing, namely design QA. The design team then walks through the digital product together with the programmers to see how the design was ultimately delivered.
When a developer has finished coding new functionalities or templates, he calls the designer or design team to evaluate them and sign off for approval. The design team looks at the developer's completed work, compares it to the original design and indicates which things could be done differently or better. The developer implements this feedback until the coded work is completely in accordance with the UI and design.
A total review for a website or other digital channel can also be done in the same way. The developer and designer work together to make the site completely consistent with the original design and UI.
The benefits of design QA in your workflow
By integrating design QA into your workflow you make a number of things manifest:
- We believe that correct, consistent design and a good UI are important. This makes our digital product valuable to the user. With this mantra you motivate team members to achieve the best possible results.
- The designers, web and app developers working as a team. The designer plays a major role in the work of a developer so that a better end product is created across the board.
It is important to really anchor design QA as an indispensable step in your process, just like a good testing procedure is. If you do not anchor this properly, this step can quickly be skipped due to time pressure or carelessness, which significantly increases the chance of design debt. The designer and developer sign off the coded work together so that the testing team can continue testing the new features and templates. Because the less design debt, the better the experience for the user, the higher the final conversion will be!
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