What comes to your mind when you think of quality?
For many of us it is our craft. We think of quality in terms of the code we write or our ability to follow a process such as Agile; the more story points we complete in a sprint, the higher our quality.
High quality craftsmanship and process are the foundation of what we do. Celebrate if a high level of quality has been achieved. It is no small feat.
When we only view quality through the lens of process and craftsmanship we miss out on a higher level of quality which is the quality of design. The quality that gets people to purchase a product, it delivers delight to the users and they talk about it with their friends.
People don’t buy a products based on technology stack or the process that was used to build it. We buy products because of they way they look and feel, the problems they solve, the delight they add to our lives, how they make us feel when we use them. In short, the experience we have when using the product.
The quality of design. It is what separates Apple from Dell, the utilitarian from a master piece of art.
The quality of design digs deep to understand the underlying problems, it’s curious, almost nosey wanting to know who is using the product, their goals and how they behave. Its relentless, constantly asking questions, challenging assumptions, generating ideas and testing them with users to see how well they work. Its obsessive with details because it knows good is the enemy of great.
It is not easy, does not happen by chance and will never be achieved unless it is the driving force behind your products.
Its goal is to solve the right problems, deliver an experience that delights the users, it creates ROI for the business and strengthens the brand it represents.
It sells products.
What comes to your mind when you think of quality?
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Beauty is what comes to mind when I think of quality…whether is a beautiful experience or beautiful code. I wish we all left behind beautiful products/code when we close a project.
As you said, some teams are so caught up on the delivery of a product (velocity, story points, etc…) that we forget to take the time to focus on the quality/beauty of the product.
For me quality is about continuous improvement. You can achieve high quality and become the toyota of your industry but you should think about how can I get better and become the next bentley.
Quality means many things. There is quality of a process, quality of code, quality of design, quality of usability. Achieving quality in all of its realms means mastering a product.
When you buy a mac the experience of opening the box, taking the manual out of the nice black envelop that when pulled helps you bring out something else along with it, starting it up and seeing an amazing 3d galaxy tour that welcomes you in 30 different languages, the material of the laptop, the weight, the design the entire process that it wen trough in order to build it combines and ends up in mastery. Quality is a goal that needs to be achieved in all of the different areas that are a part of a product. Believing that because you can deliver something fast in iterative chunks with state of the art code you are delivering the best quality of a product is a fallacy. You are simply achieving quality in fast deliverables.
If those deliverables fulfill a users need, if they amaze the user, if they know how to guide the user naturally, if they create such an impact on the user that 4 months after they buy the product they still remember opening that box and grabbing that slick back envelope, and navigating through that 3d galaxy with welcome messages, then, and only then can you say you have achieve the highest level of quality called mastery.
imo Quality is driven by ideas and not by process. The idea that this product or app can be awesome, beneficial, fun, useful, etc.; believing in that idea (and getting the team to believe in it), and letting that drive the process through which quality starts to shine through.
Usually the reverse happens, a rigid process with irrelevant benchmarks and a ‘get it out the door’ mentality which can create a false sense of quality. If you’re not passionate about making a ‘quality’ product, then your users won’t get a quality product.
When I think about quality, I feel it is a parameter for judging a product’s success. Product can be a good quality product or a bad. Quality of anything, a product or a system or a process depends on how it works and how user feels while using it. Undoubtedly quality of the design code and the design of the product both are equally important, they are like the two sides of the coin. If you miss anyone of it, it will become useless. To get a good product one need to follow a best practices/ processes. Good quality processes will lead to good products.
In summary, quality is parameter to measure:
- how good your product looks
- how good your product functions
- how easy it is to maintain and upgrade
- how easy your product is to use
- how good user of the product feels
Anything we design, is for certain groups of users, so keeping users in mind, their first impression about the product, product’s efficiency, easiness to use; all adds up to the quality of the product.
Thanks for the post! I loved reading through it ( and the comments everybody’s put in ).
Strictly speaking of software, quality IMHO is three things – low cost of maintenance, a highly intuitive and usable UI (usablity includes performance too! ) and a great design that solves just the problems that the users would like to see solved (no overdone features, no misses on crucial expectations).
Quality, for me, is what gives the users a MEMORABLE experience! When I use any product, and I like it, I will never forget it. I will remember the experience for a long time, recommend it to my friends, and I would like to go back to the same experience – again and again!
For me the essence of quality is : Keeping in mind that the product you are making is not the only thing that the end users are going to use or work with. Your product could probably consume only 15 minutes of the end user’s daily schedule and a good quality product is something that makes those 15 minutes efficient, fun and stress free for them and possibly the best 15 minutes they had in the entire day.
Quality is probably what makes me go back to the same thing over and over again – may it be a restaurant, a product, a hotel or a website.
Its what makes my experience special and so good that I become loyal and gets me hooked. The fact that its reliable, consistent, worth my time / effort and in the end solves for my ‘issue’ at hand.