Who’s Screen is it Anyway?

Muneesh Kapoor / 14 Feb 2020

When it comes to any development project, quality is everything. Quality Assurance (QA) is a systematic process that ensures product and service excellence. In most projects, there is a team of QA testers who conduct comprehensive testing where they are basically verifying the output based on some technical documents. However, designers should break free from the classical roles and responsibilities of QA and conduct their own testing process. They have been involved since the start of the project and it’s their ideas and design that have come to fruition.

Below are the best practices that designers should follow while conducting their QA.

• Designers should not get too attached to their design and keep an eye on the bigger picture i.e. user experience. Instead of marking any deviation from the design as an error, they should talk to the developer. There could a genuine ‘technical constraint’. This conversation will lead to a better solution.
• Prioritize changes based on usage. These changes can be charted on an impact vs effort graph. High impact, low effort changes are low-hanging fruits and should be tackled first. Post those changes, the developers can tackle high impact, high effort changes and finally the low impact, low effort changes.

• Designers can prepare their own QA checklist which keeps evolving based on their experience of previous projects.
• Cross-browser testing is important and often ignored aspect of testing phase. Browser vendors follow Open Web Standards, but they have their own interpretations of it. Since they each render HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in unique ways, it is important check the interface on different browsers or different versions of a single browser.
• Test on actual devices whenever possible. Emulators are a great place to start but there are things that you just can’t find on emulators and simulators, and that’s one of the biggest reasons that people use them in conjunction with real devices.
• Document everything. Text isn’t enough while documenting as there is high probability of the point getting lost in translation. Use image and video screenshots wherever possible. Also, use a change management process to track all the changes found during the testing process.