Design System Glossary

Design QA

Design QA is the practice of reviewing built UI against the design — checking that tokens are used correctly, component states match the spec, spacing follows the scale, and accessibility behaviour is intact. It happens in the gap between dev complete and release, and a design system makes it cheaper because most of what you'd otherwise check is enforced by the components themselves.

The tools are mundane: a checklist, a Figma side-by-side, browser dev tools, and increasingly visual regression testing for the deterministic parts. The hard part is making it routine — design QA is one of the first things skipped when deadlines compress, and it's where most of the small drift in a system happens. We cover where it sits in delivery in our product design process.