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?

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…