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Design Stage

Better together - how QA and Design can benefit each other

September 17, 2025 1:15 PM

Power Talk

🇬🇧 English

Wisła

About

Some things just work better together—like Design and QA. Their collaboration leads to smoother, more intuitive, and higher-quality user experiences.

This session explores real-life examples of how QA and Design teamwork improved our product. You’ll learn how to conduct design testing sessions, identify usability issues, and provide valuable product insights.

By bridging this gap, you’ll reduce rework, speed up delivery, and contribute to a polished, user-friendly product.

Join us and make a real impact on Product Design!

Speakers

Photo of Olga Godek, Design Coordinator at SwingDev - a Hippo company

Design Coordinator at SwingDev - a Hippo company

Photo of Grzegorz Niczyporuk, Engineering Manager at SwingDev - a Hippo company

Grzegorz Niczyporuk

Engineering Manager at SwingDev - a Hippo company

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From the recording

Talk in brief

In this WaysConf 2025 presentation, Olga Godek and Grzegorz Niczyporuk from SwingDev advocate for breaking down the traditional silos between Quality Assurance (QA) and Design. Historically, QA was positioned at the very end of the development cycle, leading to expensive, late-stage bug fixes and unaddressed usability gaps. By shifting quality left and integrating QA early into the design phase, teams can identify edge cases, design gaps, and logical inconsistencies before code is written. Conversely, involving designers in implementation reviews allows them to maintain design fidelity and hold developers accountable. Through real-world examples from their mobile team, the speakers demonstrate how close collaboration transforms QA engineers from mere bug hunters into powerful user advocates, ultimately resulting in more resilient products and higher user trust.

Key takeaways

01
Shift Quality Left
Testing designs and requirements early in the process makes bugs and usability gaps significantly cheaper and easier to resolve.
Watch from 9:13
02
QA as User Advocates
QA engineers spend extensive time navigating products from an outsider's perspective, allowing them to champion user experience and consistency.
Watch from 14:05
03
Designers Must Ask Why
When reviewing implemented builds, designers should question deviations from their original mockups to prevent compromises blamed on budget or history.
Watch from 9:31
04
Visual Specs Empower QA
Providing QA with clear visual specifications and context allows them to write better test cases and dramatically shorten debugging times.
Watch from 13:27
05
Cooperative Edge-Case Discovery
QA possesses a unique ability to spot edge cases and ask uncomfortable questions about user behavior that designers might overlook.
Watch from 11:31

Video chapters

4:32The Pitfalls of Traditional QA Handoffs
This section explores the historical waterfall approach where QA is left at the very end of the development cycle, leading to accumulated delays and expensive late-stage fixes.
6:31Shifting Quality Left at SwingDev
The speakers introduce a collaborative case study from SwingDev's mobile team showing how early QA involvement prevents usability gaps.
9:31Holding Implementation Accountable
This chapter explains why designers should participate in build reviews and ask critical questions when developers deviate from Figma designs.
11:01The QA Superpower: Spotting Edge Cases
This section highlights how QA professionals identify hidden logical gaps and edge cases that designers often miss during the visual creation phase.
12:33Visual Specifications as QA Gold
The speakers discuss how providing QA with early access to design specifications helps them write superior test cases and reduce debugging times.
14:05QA Engineers as User Advocates
This chapter redefines the role of QA from simple bug hunters to critical advocates who evaluate the product's overall feel and consistency.
15:38A Practical Collaboration Checklist
The presentation concludes with five actionable steps teams can take immediately to establish a seamless workflow between designers and QA.

Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Failure of Late-Stage QA

In the traditional software development model, quality assurance was positioned at the absolute end of the delivery pipeline. This setup inevitably caused all project delays, frustrations, and late-discovered issues to pile up right before the release deadline. When QA finally received the designs under intense time pressure, they often discovered that the actual implementation did not function as intended. Trying to resolve these issues so late in the process is incredibly slow, expensive, and stressful for the entire team.

Watch from 4:32

The Value of Shifting Quality Left

Bringing QA into the design process early allows teams to identify usability issues before any code is written. When we shift quality to the left, we test the designs, requirements, and initial inputs at the start of the project. This proactive approach ensures that bugs and design gaps are caught when they are still cheap and simple to fix. For managers, this efficiency is the strongest argument for maintaining a highly skilled, collaborative design and QA team.

Watch from 8:11

Empowering Designers to Ask Why

When QA invites designers to review the actual implemented product, it creates a perfect opportunity for designers to ask why certain elements do not match their original vision. If developers did not follow the design specifications, asking for their reasoning helps hold them accountable. Excuses like historical constraints or budget limitations often mask a simple lack of alignment, and addressing these gaps ensures the final product feels exactly as it was intended to feel.

Watch from 9:31

Why QA Needs Visual Specifications

QA engineers cannot rely on common sense alone to test a product; they require concrete requirements, specifications, and designs. Having early access to visual specifications is incredibly valuable for QA because it provides the necessary context for how new features should behave. With this information, QA can design much better test cases, cover complex edge cases, write more insightful UX-focused bug reports, and significantly reduce overall debugging time.

Watch from 12:33

Redefining QA as User Advocates

While many people stereotypically view QA engineers merely as bug hunters, they actually serve as vital user advocates. Because QA spends so much time interacting with the application from the perspective of an average, uninformed user, they excel at spotting usability friction that others miss. They can identify when a flow technically works but feels confusing or inconsistent, raising the quality bar and helping the product earn valuable user trust.

Watch from 14:05

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