Design debt is often a hidden killer of consistency. Here’s how to resolve it.
Paying off Design debt in small chunks helps to improve overall design consistency
Have you ever found yourself on a project where inconsistency is a thorn in your side?
Whether it’s being part of a re-design with incredibly tight project constraints, or knowing that the necessary large-scale changes for consistency are going to be nearly impossible to implement, sometimes projects seem to have a piecemeal approach towards consistency.
However, the root cause of this might be something that you might not have realized: your organization might have too much design debt. Design debt is one thing that’s rarely talked about, but too much of it can kill efficiency and creative freedom. Even worse, it can often seem impossible to handle Design debt alone.
Just like any other debt, though, there are steps you can take to chip away at your organization’s UX Debt slowly. But to do that, we first need to define design debt.
Design debt happens when you take shortcuts.
The simple explanation of design debt is that it’s the leftover work that occurs when you take shortcuts. To explain this, let’s examine an environment that usually breeds Design debt: the ‘fail-fast’ environment.
I’ve been on teams that have insisted on squeezing user testing, analysis, re-design, and then design-developer hand-off into a single two-week sprint. The idea was to consistently have an iterated design available to the public at the end of each sprint.
However, these tight timelines and project constraints usually create a massive amount of Design (and technical) Debt. When you’re that crunched for time, one of the first things to disappear is documentation, which means you’re often relying on your developers to interpret your design without issues. However, that’s not the only thing that can happen: user testing, brand consistency, and product vision can also fall by the wayside.
Skipping these things in favor of fast and ‘iterative’ solutions can have some adverse long-term effects. First and foremost, Design debt sours users on your brand perception and long-term market share. Launching a suboptimal design means many customers will be turned away, as they will only give your website one chance before going elsewhere.
However, customers that stay with your product will also be problematic, as they can get accustomed to (and even like) your lousy design. Users have told me not to change the system unless I completely rebuild everything, as incremental changes force them to re-learn a frustrating experience.
This only becomes more problematic if you work on a suite of products. Some of you may have encountered a Catch-22 situation with trying to make design changes to one product that’s part of a suite of products.
You’re told that you can’t change a bad design pattern because it has to remain consistent with how other products are structured, and you can’t get people to make changes across the entire product suite because you’re only supposed to be working on that one.
As a result, Design debt is one of those things that can negatively affect your entire organization, and it can be incredibly intimidating to tackle. However, you can chip away at existing design debt if you tackle one of its core difficulties: making it clear what you (or your team) need to do.
Simplify what actions to take around debt
What is more accessible for people to act on, paying off $250,000 or $250 a month in student loans?
It’s the latter, for many reasons. First, when you’re greeted with such a vast number, it can be intimidating to try and figure out where to start. There can also be an emotional aspect to something that large: it can quickly feel like you have no hope of ever paying it off.
This is why one of the essential things many businesses will do is break those larger numbers into something more manageable. So whether it’s $250 a month for student loans or $200 a month for a car payment, these are numbers that people are more likely to be able to take action on.
With that in mind, what are the smallest actions you can turn your Design debt into to make it easy for your team to take action? Usually, the answer is to turn them into user stories for your Agile backlog.
Address your Design Debt through your Agile backlog
If your organization uses Agile (which most do), you might be invited to Backlog sessions, grooming, and other Agile ceremonies. This is a ceremony that many team members are invested in, such as Product Managers and Agile coaches.
It’s not always clear what Designers are supposed to do during these sessions other than talk about what you’re working on, but it can be one of the best places to address and clear Design debt.
This is because the rest of the team is invested in making Agile sprints productive. For example, product Managers and Agile coaches will ask if you have any roadblocks, meetings will occur if there are outstanding issues, and the entire team is pushing to resolve all of the assigned user stories in a sprint.
So if you’re able to capture your Design Debt as a user story, and it’s taken into the backlog, there’s a high chance of resolving it in a short time. Therefore, learning how to turn Design debt into actionable user stories is critical.
There are three steps to this process:
Take a Design Debt inventory
Prioritize which Design Debt items to focus on
Schedule a period to work on it
The first step is to find a place to capture any Design debt items. This is typically done in one of two ways:
Adding Design debt items directly to the backlog for prioritization
Capturing Design debt items in a spreadsheet, then adding them to the backlog
I find the 2nd approach to work better for me, as this supports the ‘small payments’ method better. It’s hard to know how you should prioritize particular items without looking at all of them at once. However, we often don’t have time for an in-depth heuristic product evaluation.
So capturing the Design debt issues, you come across while working can be helpful. These may include:
User interface issues (consistency across buttons, links, and visual styling)
Interaction design (moving from page to page, animations, and scrolling effects)
Copy, content, and messaging (titles, labels, headlines, and bodies of text)
Information architecture (navigation structures, menu items, and classification)
Accessibility elements (contrast, visual focus indicators, text alternatives, etc.)
Customer journey consistency (moving across products/entire experience)
Recording these items in your spreadsheet will make it clear to the design team that there is debt to clear, but then we have to take some time to think about what to bring to the rest of the team.
Prioritize elements to take into your backlog
For each Design debt item, try to write out enough detail to have an idea to know how it should be prioritized.
This may include:
Description of issue from the user’s standpoint (i.e., how is it affecting them?)
Where in the user journey does this occur?
How often does this occur?
What level of UX/Development effort is needed to fix this issue?
What type of benefit will the user receive from fixing this issue?
Etc.
The ultimate goal of this is to be able to classify the issues on two axes: User Value and Ease of Fixing.
Seeing this sort of prioritization matrix helps us decide one key thing: which elements will stay in the spreadsheet for this sprint and which items should move to the backlog.
Figure out 1–3 Design Debt items to roll into each sprint
This spreadsheet of debt items will allow you to balance your workload in each sprint between your current project work and the older debt you are trying to resolve.
Usually, you’ll be able to tackle between 1–3 Design Debt items without difficulty, especially if they’ve been broken down into small user stories (such as “Fix the top menu item labels across all page”). While you do this, you can also show the progress you’re making in clearing Design Debt, along with evidence from user testing, to help leaders and executives understand the progress made and why it’s crucial.
Some Design Debt items will be too big for a single sprint: for example, resolving consistency across an entire product suite will involve organizing meetings with several different departments.
However, tackling these issues, a few steps at a time, can help you resolve what might seem like an impossible amount of Design debt.
Tackle Design debt in small chunks to make significant progress
Debts of any kind can sap productivity, and Design debt is no different. When you’re in a situation where you realize that you can make no meaningful difference as a UX Designer, you might find yourself demoralized.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a difference. Take some time to think about how you can address some of this UX debt from Agile sprint to sprint, and you might find that the once insurmountable debt problem becomes much easier to deal with.
Completing just a few minor extra items each Agile sprint can help to improve the overall UX of your entire organization.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer, Design Writer, and author of the Data and Design newsletter. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.