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Ux as QA - User Experience is the Ultimate Quality Assurance for your Product

User Experience is like Quality Assurance for your product - except that it starts at product inception and continues throughout the process. Quality Assurance efforts help you answer: does the product I built do what I said it would do? User Experience efforts allow you to answer something even more important: does the product I am building do what it should do to be attractive to my target users?

Many companies leave user testing to the end of the development lifecycle when it is most costly and least impactful. Research applied at the right points in the process can lead to breakthrough improvements that streamline development and increase market adoption of your product.

If user experience efforts are applied throughout the product development lifecycle, it allows a team to find early design wins and make quick changes when they are less expensive to implement. User experience efforts, when applied correctly, increase both ROI and time to market.

During the Discovery and Exploration phase user experience efforts include contextual interviews with users, analysis of competitors, market readiness and pricing strategy, as well as task flow analysis and the development of user personas and profiles. These efforts allow a product team to understand their customers at a deeper level and gain an understanding of how their product might best fit their customer's needs. The sooner you can understand this, the more secure you can be in your choices regarding features and product design, leading to fewer changes further down the development process when those changes have more impact on schedule and budget.

During the Planning phase, user experience efforts help you better define requirements for the product and establish early initial design ideas. It allows you to make better decisions at this stage so that as the product moves into development, you can be more confident that you are building a product whose features meet your value propositions and resonate with your customer's underlying assumptions, values and lifestyle. Activities include stakeholder interviews, focus groups, prototyping, and rapid, iterative design sessions.

This is the phase were the ROI and time to market begin to bear out. If a company has already done work on understanding what features and design constructs resonate most with their users, requirements should now be clear and focus shifts to implementation of the most usable design. UX efforts during this phase include information architecture, wireframes, visual identity and quick iterative user testing and design.

Now we begin to enter into the phase when companies traditionally think of applying user experience efforts - just prior to release. User acceptance testing allows a company to validate the design of their product. Ideally, if user experience efforts were applied correctly early in the process, this testing uncovers very few bugs. If however, this is the first time any real user feedback is infused into the development process, teams tend to encounter a very long list of user issues. This often leads to major redesign requirements or a slip in schedule to fix showstopper issues found at this late stage, after hundreds of thousands, or sometimes millions of dollars have already been invested.

Incorporating user experience design into the development of your product or service speaks to your bottom line as much as it does your user. It allows you to build a product development process that infuses the user into early requirements definition activities. It helps catch bugs before they are included in the expensive software or hardware development phases. Ultimately, it helps to ensure that you are releasing a product or service that is more likely to meet your user's needs and resonate with their values and lifestyle, leading to larger market adoption and increased sales.