Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Carlos Yllobre

This is my honest attempt — based on my experience and many articles read — to shed some light on these ideas and hopefully help some product designers out there to understand what is V&V and how important it is for a product. Of course, I am helping myself too, writing and drawing cool charts is one of the best methods I have found to organise my ideas in a way that makes sense. So here we go.

First, let’s check this standard product development diagram, maybe yours is not exactly like this, but it doesn’t matter, I am just going to use it to illustrate how and where V&V happens.

And here is explained in more detail:

Before going deeper on both concepts, we need to understand that verification and Validation, even though the are commonly used together, are two different things and they are not necessarily applied following a specific order or structure, in fact, most of the time both are ongoing and overall processes happening at different points in your workflow at the same time. But what is Verification and Validation, and how we can apply them to improve our Design decisions, and consequently, our product?

Verification

The main question that a Product team has to answer while performing a product verification is “Are we building the Product right?” In other words, we verify that the system and platforms used to build our product are working well. Things like the programming language, API, basic design parameters and technical requirements. In plain words, Verification is the process we use to determine the quality of our product.

How we run a verification analysis

Some of the most common methods used while building a product are the automated tests, code review, style checkers and integration tests. From the design point of view, verifying is something you accomplish when building a sitemap, an operational wireframe, a clear and concise styles guideline or when checking for consistency across the multiple user interfaces.

Validation

Validation is a wider and an on-going process that shouldn’t only occur at a very specific stage but it should be present during the whole software development lifecycle. With Validation, we check that the product we are building matches the users’ and business needs.The main question here is “Are we building the right product?” but some other -more- specific questions should also take place, like: “Is the product solving a real problem?”, “Is there a big enough market out there for the product?” or “Does this product represent a key point for our business, in terms of revenue, marketing or substantial improvement?

How to validate a design

Validation should take place from the early to the final stages of our product lifecycle and even after the release of the final solution. The most commonly used methods are surveys/questionnaires, usability tests, card sorting, eye-tracking, A/B tests and a continuous monitoring of how users are responding and interacting with your product even after every release.

Conclusion

V&V is not just another fancy short term to make our design process more ‘glamorous’, it is an essential methodology we need to apply in order to satisfy the user and business needs and to deliver a product that matches the industry quality standards. My suggestion is to adopt (and to adapt) these methods to the specific requirements of every stage of your product development model.

Thank you for reading! 😃

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Understanding Verification and Validation in Product Design was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Understanding Verification and Validation in Product Design

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