Designers seek perfection. Attention to detail is our job. And a successful mobile app is a bug-free, pixel-perfect manifestation of our vision. As it turns out – no matter how detailed our style guides may be – this is unlikely to happen right out of the gate, especially if the project is following the agile process which entails multiple iterations.

It is often a nail-biting experience to test the first iteration that integrates your UI. Sometimes it ain’t pretty. Either a font is wrong or a button is too small or a colour is neon green instead of teal – I could go on. But it’s okay! All you have to do is record the errors or oversights until they are resolved. It sounds daunting but it is an important step of the process and there are tools that can help make your life easier. In the end, with the right attention to detail, process, and tools, you’ll have the beautiful and functional app you imagined.

Visual Quality Assurance

The main objective of VQA is to make sure your team lead(s) and developers understand the issue. It is important to take the time to record all the information they might need to find and fix the problem. In addition to describing the problem the following materials are crucial to creating an effective bug report:

• Steps Taken: Explain how you found the problem.
• Screenshots: Showing is the easiest way of communicating a visual issue.
• Device Details: Developers need to recreate the issue in order to test their fix and the problem may be specific to the device or operating system.

Bonus:

• Annotations: Drawing or annotating the problem right on the screenshot to point out the incorrect element is a big bonus.
• Video: There are cases where a screenshot may not be enough. Videos can clearly illustrate an animation or transition error.

Capturing all of this information can be tedious and time-consuming, which can lead to cutting corners and incomplete bug reports. This is a problem because bugs may bounce back, with your developers asking for additional information so they can adequately address the issue. This slows the process and is more of a hassle for everyone involved. Luckily, there are tools that can help you to capture all of the necessary information, saving time and reducing the stress associated with VQA.

In the end, ensuring that your VQA process is efficient will help you deliver a better mobile app that users will love – all in a timely fashion.