How and where report design QA findings to the development team

You found some bugs during the design QA test, but where and how do you share them?

You did a great UX design process and the design looks good, you feel comfortable delivering it to the developer, but when it is implemented, there are gaps between the implementation and the design. In order to overcome this issue and to create products that look close to the design, the designer should implement a design QA (quality assurance) process. But, how do you report all your findings and share them with the developers? In this article, I will try to answer those questions.

What is design QA testing?

Quality assurance is a process the designers do after the developers implement a solution, in which they review all the functional design and visual designs to ensure the development team implemented the design correctly into the product. It is not like the quality assurance testing that the QA team makes, since it focuses on design and development gaps, not normal bugs.

Why do we need design QA?

There are always differences between the design and the final implementation. It could be that the UX designer didn’t explain the solution well, or the engineer didn’t pay attention to certain details. Because of that, the designer needs to review the implementation to make sure everything is implemented as designed. So the team knows the product will deliver close to the design and is of high quality.

Common Challenges in the design QA process

There are a few challenges the team needs to overcome with design QA.

Design QA isn’t part of the product development process

Design QA usually happens between the development process and QA testing, but not all teams have it. In the event that this step doesn’t exist during the development cycle, the designer needs to convince people of its importance.

Lack of time

Sometimes the product designer doesn’t have time to do quality assurance on a design. The team is in a hurry to deliver…