Some ideas about design quality assurance (DQA)

Business trip to China Yahoo, the style and Taobao is very different. And Yahoo a ratio, Taobao office environment is a market, noisy, everywhere are people, running in the aisles scurrying, in each conference room to win red.

It's really different, it's very technical and it's an engineer style. In this quiet environment, just give me some time to write down the question I've been thinking about recently: DQA (Design Quality assurance).

If you search Dqa now, you can find a lot of, but it seems only limited to the traditional manufacturing industry. The Taiwanese hardware company , for example, introduced their dqa:

DQA- Design Quality Assurance starts in the conceptual stage of a project and covers the product development stage to ensure qu Ality is designed-in by quality engineers for reliability. All Aaeon products must pass safety and environmental testing by a laboratory to ensure the product meets th e Requirements of CE/UL/FCC/CCC standards. Moreover, it also is required to go through a extensive and comprehensive test plan for compatibility, function, Performa nCE and usability.

Note Several key words: test, requirement, standard, compatibility, function, performance, usability.

Only from the company's perspective, they are primarily using testing methods to evaluate product compatibility, functionality, performance, and usability, based on requirements and standards.

Does it seem that it can be directly extended to activities that guarantee the quality of Web product design? Let's make a simple analysis.

Object

First of all, we must define the target object of quality assurance. I think it's not just the interface design, but it should be extended to product design. The design of the Internet product has an obvious characteristic: the interface design is finished, the product is formed, the product design is good, the interface also sorta. So in many Internet companies, ui/ue and product managers have different degrees of overlap in their job responsibilities and content, and in some companies they become the root of some contradictions. I would like to explain that the design quality of Internet products is determined by the interface and functional design, and there is no good way to differentiate them at present.

So, in this case, it's better to give up the idea of trying to separate the interface from the function, as a whole. This whole is the product , we want to ensure the quality, is the quality of product design .

indicator

So what is the quality of the product design to evaluate? The company's assessment indicators include: requirement, compatibility, function, performance, usability. With vernacular said, is the product design to meet the requirements, compatibility is not good, the function is not complete, performance has no problem, is not easy to use?

We are not here to see whether business success, market acceptance is not high such indicators, it is necessary to be clear, quality assurance only to ensure the quality of product design , and not guarantee the success of the product. If this is not clear, quality assurance will bear the unbearable weight, is also impossible to carry out.

So on the Internet product design , I think to ensure that the quality indicators may have so many aspects: the quality of demand, functional integrity, usability, artistic consistency.

1. quality of demand . That is, in the initial stage of product design, we extracted the demand is the user's real needs, whether it is the user's greatest needs, whether we are now to meet the needs?
2. Functional Completeness . Is there a need, and does our capabilities meet these requirements, and do we meet them in the right way?
3. availability . Needless to say, do interface design peers are aware. That's what most companies and teams are doing right now.
4. artistic consistency . Internet product design is an activity with artistic participation, so designers are often called art artists in the early days. But can art be evaluated? I think the part of the high level is not going to work. But it can be evaluated at the low level, such as consistency. Consistency is a very, very important part of Internet product design, so I've also listed it as an indicator.

I did not mention compatibility and performance because I think they (both front end and back end) belong to software engineering and should be guaranteed by SQA (Software Quality assurance) rather than DQA.

Standard

To evaluate something, there must be a corresponding theoretical support, according to a certain standard. Otherwise, the evaluation becomes a kind of subjective activity, which loses the objectivity and consistency of the guarantee .

In a few words here, for some of the art of a greater proportion of the industry, especially some creative industries (such as advertising industry), quality assurance is to a large extent through the subjective method, but also used very well. The "chief designer" system is the best quality assurance system in these industries. There are many internet companies also have "chief designer" system, but for the Internet product design, the proportion of art is not so large advertising industry, so in the "Chief", coupled with a certain objective system is still very necessary.

Before we talk about DQA, we'll look at SQA. The main theoretical basis of SQA is software engineering , a discipline that has been developed for several decades. Through the world so many scientific research institutions and enterprises of the development, practice, has been very perfect and complete. Standards have CMM, CMMI, ISO, 6SIGMA, etc. standards, so in the development of SQA activities, there are theoretical support, there are standards to follow.

In the reverse view of Internet product design, the theory we can use now seems to be only usability engineering and a small part of software engineering. And the standard part, also does not have an international standard. It can be said that we have stepped in the water, but the front still need stones.

Ok. We've got a problem! This is an exciting thing, whenever the problem arises, it gives us the opportunity to break through.

In response to the "Indicators" section of the four indicators, we can start with their own companies and teams, first of all, based on practical, simple and feasible standards. For example, user Interface Design Guide/specification, usability checklist, user requirements checklist, and so on. We do not seek all-inclusive standards, we only consider Chanping, practical standards, specific how to make, how to design a system of standards, now I also have no clue, first step out of the first to say it!

Of course, if there is any organization to consider these things from a larger scope, at least I am extremely welcome.

Activities

So, besides the standard, what kind of design quality assurance activities can we do at present?

To draw on SQA, I think at least we can include these activities:

1. Product Concept phase:
   Through the user research method (questionnaire survey, interview, etc.) mining demand, verify the requirements integrity;
2. Product design phase:
   Assess availability by means of usability testing.
3. Throughout the process:
   Through to the design activity process management, the supervision, guarantees the design process the reasonable order, guarantees the design delivery complete.
4. After the design is complete:
   Through the summary of the design process review, improve the design process, improve the design of the delivery form, complete design process document template.

Post Language

Last night with an hungry belly of the peer (^_^) Exchange, when he heard I want to mention the concept of DQA, big shout: Don't, do not, now the design industry has been enough chaos! Very reasonable, now a variety of concepts have been many to let the new fear, so that the master aversion.

The concept rises and falls, but the goals behind it are constant: better design, more valuable design.

Why do I have to mention the concept of DQA?

From the practice of Taobao, we absorb a lot of other concepts, ucd/ui/ue/ur/usability/accessability and so on, and so on, we also from their own point of view more or less apply them to the usual work. But this application is not a system, in the guerrilla state. The interaction of this project is complex, do a usability test, the user group of the project is not familiar, do a user survey; The project has a lot of members, our design documents should be more detailed, so that everyone can be looked at. Of course this is efficient and we may continue to do so. But in the long run, we need a system of theoretical support for all of these activities.

If you put all these activities into the dqa of the height and system, everything is logical, you can better promote UCD, but also may be the design and design team value from "Word-of-mouth" to the "fact" level. Believe that those who have experienced these pain and have a certain understanding of the SQA peers, must be able to understand the implication of this energy.