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PROCESS • ORG: Delivery Hero
Last Mile: Setting up the Design QA process
for seamless feature development
May 2022
It is always a challenge to ship a build-on production server that makes the product manager, designer, and engineering teams satisfied. When the team shipped our first BETA release, we saw the design team was noticeably unhappy with the build quality. They were pointing out a host of issues in the build that went to the consumers and came to understand that the problems went thru' the QA (quality assurance) process because developers, product managers, and designers never checked for the design issues before sending out the build to the QA-team for testing. So this process got created to fix this hole in the process.
So how did I go about setting up the process?
To start with, I worked with the product manager, an engineering manager from a different squad than mine, 1-2 designers, and a couple of QA members to understand better how we can together set up a process that compliments the current flow of projects and integrate it without breaking the shipping speed of the current sprint.
Let's see the breakdown of each step.
01
Understanding the current process
The first step was to document the process that is currently in place, so I can understand better where the missing piece of the puzzle is.
The end-to-end design process at the start
02
Interviewing stakeholders
The next step was to interview 6-8 stakeholders from the team and hear how they would currently perform a desk check within the current flow of projects. I got to connect with these participants:
Product Designers - 2x
Quality Assurance - 2x
Engineering Manager - 1x
Content Designer - 1x
Front-end Developer - 1x
I conducted and documented all the interviews on MIRO. The above is what all the interviews together looked like
The stakeholders were asked to brainstorm 1:1 how they envisioned an ideal desk check process and when in the product life cycle it should be added
03
Consolidating learnings
Once the interviews were concluded, I collated everything that I learned from the stakeholders into a single thread process. 👇
The desk check process essentially became a part of the Delivery Track.
Discovery Track ➡️ Discover, Design, Review
Delivery Track ➡️ Build, Analyze, Monitor
The new process with desk check included
04
Desk Check/Design QA Process
Based on the discussions with engineering and product, the desk check process can go through multiple corrections between development and engineering until satisfaction is reached by content, design, and product management. To drive satisfaction, the build would be thoroughly matched with the Figma files and JIRA stories.
The development team can object to certain functionalities and drive consistency based on previously developed features.
The process aims to improve the build quality and decrease the time to ship while keeping everyone in the team aligned toward the final product delivery.
Desk Check Process further broken down
05
Scope during Desk Check
Since desk check is an added step on top of the regular QA check, it is essential to scope out what is precisely being looked at during the checking phase.
✔ Checking for flow - happy, negative, error edge cases
✔ Checking if all values and states are correct
✔ Checking for micro-copy issues
✔ Checking for visual inconsistencies like icons, typography, padding, spacing, sizing, color hex – matching with Figma
✔ Expected Design vs. Actual Development
✔ Checking for hover, pressed, and clicked states
_________________________________
During desk check, the following domain expects, each squad needs to be participating:
Dev
PM
Design
Content
QA (optional)
06
Conducting Desk Check
Desk checks can be done in many different ways, and there is no right or wrong here. But given the fact that most engineering team members are scattered across APAC and EU regions, we considered the following options and decided to do everything remotely on Slack or JIRA.
Sending the presentation to the team and receiving some supporting comments
The presentation on Desk Check Process that was given to the entire product and engineering team members
Implementing the process in a new org
After I transitioned from HeroCash to foodpanda, as a team we encountered similar issues with the Design QA process, and I led the implementation of the process at the Corporate team of foodpanda again with all of my experience. This time with a slight change to the approach based on the new org. The process once again worked very well. You can find the new pitch deck below 👇.
Corporate_ Design QA.pdf
Projects to explore
