The article discusses the often unrecognized bottleneck of design-to-development quality assurance (QA) in digital product design. Despite meticulous planning in design tools like Figma, small discrepancies between design mocks and production code can lead to brand inconsistency and user fatigue. Issues arise from fragmentation of tools, time constraints, differing mental models between designers and developers, and lack of a single source of truth. The article suggests that even minor design oversights can accumulate, resulting in significant long-term design debt and diminishing user trust in products.
After fifteen years hopping between design systems, dev stand-ups, and last-minute launch scrambles, I'm convinced design-to-dev QA is still one of the most underestimated bottlenecks in digital product work.
A mis-sized button or missing hover state rarely breaks a feature, so they slide into production. But enough "close enough" decisions create brand erosion.
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