The best digital customer experiences do not occur out of the blue. Final products go through several stages before being launched live, such as UI/UX Design, Project Management, Development, and Quality Assurance. Here it is where the magic happens.
UX Design in particular, it is the art of creating useful, clear, delightful and marketable products. Meanwhile, QA is the field in which it is ensured if the requirements have been met or not. So, why is it important for QA teams to know about UX? Well, it’s pretty simple. Most people think QA Teams are mostly associated with the development teams, and at some point, that is not 100% true. Quality Assurance’s aim is to not only make sure that the product being built is on its way to meet the acceptance criteria but also making sure that the end users have no blockers to use the application accordingly. That’s where UX and QA overlap.
To Add More Value to the Applications Being Built.
How can QA teams add impact or value to UX? Well, there are times in which the managers of the project we are working with decide to enhance the customer experience by making changes to the UX. However, that decision does not only lie on the designers. QA Teams can also have an important participation in this since our job is to put ourselves in the customer's shoes, therefore we can help to make accurate suggestions that would improve the final product.
Since us QA people tend to be very analytical and attention-to-detail oriented, there are times in which we wish or expect different results from what we actually get. So, all those things get into our heads when testing rare scenarios the user may come across with; This is when we can take advantage of that.
To Create More Effective Test Cases.
When requirements and designs are just in the oven, we as QA’s have plenty of time to think about the scenarios that we might come across when testing. So, if we know more about UX we may get more creative while creating our test cases and not just stick to the common/happy paths. There are 3 kinds of requirements we all should keep in mind:
- The ones the clients say they need.
- The ones they actually need.
- The ones they don’t know they need.
At the end of the day, UX designers and QA testers are complementary roles whose aim is to create a positive impact on the customer experience and end up implementing each other’s role at some point.
