How Quality Assurance elevates Design, Development, and UX.

QA is also about how using a product feels. As a Delivery Manager (a more-encompassing title for Quality Assurance Manager), my role goes beyond functionality; it's about ensuring the user experience is intuitive, smooth, and frustration-free. According to Baymard Institute's UX Statistics, 88% of online consumers are unlikely to return to a website after a bad experience, and 90% of users abandon apps due to poor performance, which proves that seamless interactions aren't a luxury; they're essential for keeping users engaged.

What is Quality Assurance (QA)?

In digital product development, QA is the safeguard that ensures high standards before a product reaches users. Traditionally, this involves running tests, identifying bugs, and verifying functionality across different devices and browsers. QA teams use a mix of manual and automated testing to catch inconsistencies and ensure everything works as expected.

However, QA also goes beyond mere functionality. It encompasses usability, accessibility, performance, and adherence to design specifications. A strong QA process ensures that digital experiences are intuitive, error-free, and aligned with both user needs and business goals.

Yet, despite its importance, QA is often rushed or deprioritised, reducing its impact and leading to avoidable issues. When quality assurance is treated as an afterthought rather than an integral part of development, the user experience — and ultimately, customer retention — suffers.

Our approach to QA.

At Significa, QA isn’t a final checkpoint; it is embedded throughout design and development, encompassing the entire product experience. It ensures that both the client’s needs and the designer's vision are accurately brought to life while creating seamless, accessible, and high-performing digital products.

Instead of just verifying that a product functions, we make sure it works exactly as intended. We prioritise visual fidelity by comparing the final implementation to the original design. We ensure interactive elements are navigable and usable for all users, focusing on accessibility. We evaluate whether micro-interactions and animations enhance or hinder the user experience. We analyse hover states, focus states, and error messages for proper status handling.

Quality Assurance isn’t a rigid, box-ticking process, but a collaborative bridge between design and development. Our approach is set on dialogue, iteration, and continuous refinement, ensuring quality at every stage.

In fact, if a design element doesn’t translate well into code, we don’t just flag it as an issue and move on. Instead, we bring designers and developers together to discuss alternatives to achieve the optimal balance between creative vision and technical feasibility.

Automating to focus on what matters (most).

Given the iterative nature of our QA process at Significa, we haven’t heavily invested in automated testing until recently. We’ve started developing it recently, particularly with larger projects with complex user flows.

The goal is to automate repetitive QA tasks, such as verifying key e-commerce actions like adding items to a cart, creating an account, and checking out. We’re also working on streamlining performance audits and ensuring proper content structure in CMS-driven sites.

By automating these routine checks, we free up valuable time to focus on the finer details that truly elevate the user experience, such as refining animations, ensuring seamless transitions, and enhancing overall usability. The bottom line here is that we believe automation doesn’t replace human expertise in QA (or any other matter, really); it simply allows us to invest our time where it matters most.

Preventive QA x Delivery QA

Embedded in every stage of the project, from project management to development and deployment, QA can be integrated early and consistently in every project, preventing issues before they arise. For clarity, we divide it into two stages: Preventive QA and Delivery QA.

Preventive QA happens at the start of the process, focusing on setting solid foundations, which include defining reusable components, structuring the CMS (Content Management System) properly, and ensuring that design and development are aligned before implementation begins. By taking these steps early, we reduce the risk of inconsistencies and technical debt down the line.

Delivery QA, on the other hand, is the final quality check we do before each release. This is when we refine final details and ensure that everything is pixel-perfect, functions smoothly, and, most importantly, that user interactions feel intuitive. This phase guarantees that the end product meets both our standards and the client’s expectations before it goes live.

Quality Assurance in Product Management.

Since QA goes beyond proper functionality and pleasing aesthetics, Producers play a crucial role in ensuring fluid alignment between teams, user needs and business goals. Their involvement goes beyond testing; it entails fostering clarity and coordinating teams and stakeholders alike to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

From defining priorities to managing feedback loops, they help streamline processes and keep the project on track, ensuring that by the time it reaches the finish line, it meets the highest level of quality.

Often, their attentive, fresh pair of eyes also catch inconsistencies that might not be immediately obvious to the rest of the team. Whether it’s verifying that a CMS allows clients to manage content effortlessly or ensuring that a new e-commerce checkout flow feels intuitive, they continuously validate that what has been built truly serves its purpose.

Quality Assurance x Producers

In our Handbook, you can find a dedicated page on conducting Quality Assurance as a Producer.

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Testing Content Management Systems.

On this note, it is worth mentioning that many of our clients use content management systems like Storyblok, so naturally, our QA process goes beyond meeting the quality standards of front-end implementation.

We ensure that the CMS structure we build provides enough flexibility while maintaining brand consistency, allowing content editors to easily update their websites without disrupting layouts. Additionally, we verify that new features integrate seamlessly with existing components, preventing compatibility issues. This structured approach, combined with the thorough documentation we provide, ensures that businesses can scale their websites and e-commerce efficiently and independently without compromising brand design or usability.

Collaborating with clients for better outcomes.

Also Involving our clients in the QA process is a natural extension of how we collaborate. Their input is invaluable when testing CMS usability, identifying potential roadblocks, and ensuring that the digital product we are building meets their real-world needs.

This collaboration is especially vital for long-term projects, such as e-commerce platforms that evolve over time. By combining regular feedback loops with data-driven insights on user behaviour, we can make informed adjustments and optimisations — grounded in real interactions rather than just theoretical best practices.

We work with you, not for you.

Discover how we collaborate with our clients on our Handbook!

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Don’t be afraid of QA!

Our main point is that QA isn’t about nitpicking nor does it necessarily “slow things down.” Done right, it helps prevent last-minute chaos (thus preventing revenue loss), improves collaboration, and ultimately leads to better digital products. While automation and new methodologies can make QA more efficient, its real value lies in refining details, fine-tuning usability, making sure everything works as smoothly as it should, and sparking positive emotions in users.

Ultimately, whether it's aligning design with development, improving CMS usability, or catching potential friction points before users do, QA is what transforms a functional product into an exceptional one. If this all sounds slightly intimidating, think of it as less of a roadblock and more as the secret ingredient behind great digital experiences. In the end, QA is not just about making sure things work — it's about ensuring they work beautifully.