In every team I’ve been on, we’ve always had long-running discussions (sometimes edging into an argument!) about whether our product is the right level of quality. Emotions run high — on one side, no one likes being accused by their peers of accepting low quality; on the other, no one likes signing their name to something that doesn’t meet their personal quality bar.
When is a use case considered complete? At least for an MVP?
How do you measure quality in UX? Sometimes UX does something unexpected by itself, and users run into issues we have not foreseen. Do you have a strategy to measure this in production?
- completeness: are people able to get done a specific task, enough that they're willing to use it on an ongoing basis? or are they writing in to say that they can't use this bc X functionality is missing? cx tickets have been a good indicator of completeness (or bugs, but the 2 are normally easy-ish to tell apart).
- UX consistency: I think this is less about doing something unexpected (which sounds like a bug) and more about -- if you walk through the flow, can you orient yourself clearly thanks to consistent patterns? That could be tracked through a monthly or quarterly audit by someone with relatively fresh eyes who specifically looks for inconsistencies, looking at design system usage of standard components, etc.
In my experience, I find completeness to be the most difficult aspect of product quality to achieve. There always seems to be a divide between what constitutes a complete product among PMs, Designers, and Engineers. Do you have any suggestions for finding the optimal balance?
100% and I think this is a healthy tension that's structural given the incentives of each team. I think most about:
1. can we as a team have an open discussion about the tradeoffs of adding more functionality compared to more polish, faster shipping, etc - and decide on the intentional balance together?
2. what would a customer say? would they say "this is so incomplete it's not usable"? or would they say "I would like this to also do X, but I can get done Y task well with this"?
definitely curious if other heuristics have worked for you!
Very hard to define completeness and UX.
When is a use case considered complete? At least for an MVP?
How do you measure quality in UX? Sometimes UX does something unexpected by itself, and users run into issues we have not foreseen. Do you have a strategy to measure this in production?
Definitely not easy!
I think about some heuristics:
- completeness: are people able to get done a specific task, enough that they're willing to use it on an ongoing basis? or are they writing in to say that they can't use this bc X functionality is missing? cx tickets have been a good indicator of completeness (or bugs, but the 2 are normally easy-ish to tell apart).
- UX consistency: I think this is less about doing something unexpected (which sounds like a bug) and more about -- if you walk through the flow, can you orient yourself clearly thanks to consistent patterns? That could be tracked through a monthly or quarterly audit by someone with relatively fresh eyes who specifically looks for inconsistencies, looking at design system usage of standard components, etc.
As a Product manager, Product Designer and QA, i'm delighted by this reading, thank you!
In my experience, I find completeness to be the most difficult aspect of product quality to achieve. There always seems to be a divide between what constitutes a complete product among PMs, Designers, and Engineers. Do you have any suggestions for finding the optimal balance?
100% and I think this is a healthy tension that's structural given the incentives of each team. I think most about:
1. can we as a team have an open discussion about the tradeoffs of adding more functionality compared to more polish, faster shipping, etc - and decide on the intentional balance together?
2. what would a customer say? would they say "this is so incomplete it's not usable"? or would they say "I would like this to also do X, but I can get done Y task well with this"?
definitely curious if other heuristics have worked for you!