[krschultz]

Seemingly pedantic point, but this is a UX design problem not a QA problem. QA is largely something that you want to automate, minimize, and reduce the cost of. QA is making sure things work as designed. UX design is something that you want to maximize. That's figuring out what you want to make.

The tools of the UX design trade are very different. I think the best UX is done with mockups that go into customer feedback sessions. The middle ground is lots of static drawings of UX, which leads to a lot of bikeshedding and not a lot of real data. Obviously the worst is no UX design at all.

[TwistedWeasel]

I somewhat disagree, it depends on how QA fits into your organization and how you scope its role. UX needs Quality Assurance too, and sometimes things get past the UX team and into a product - at that point new issues come to light during testing and should be fed back up to the responsible teams.

In general I view QA as the last line of defense before the customer, if your QA doesn't speak up about ANY issues with the product, technical, UX or otherwise then who will?

Of course, my view of the role of QA in product design may be different from others.

[mark-r]

The best QA people I've worked with have all had this view.

[bcbrown]

>QA is making sure things work as designed.

That is why I don't like describing the Test discipline as QA. It's not QA. When I worked in Test, I viewed my role as making sure things work well for the user, which includes 'testing' the specs to make sure there's no scenarios with glaring pain points. I think there's some parallels with the Obmudsman role in acting as the internal customer advocate.