What is design debt? How to identify and manage it effectively.
Product development is almost always a tricky game of prioritization. Product owners need to carefully plan and prioritize developing features, resolving bugs, and addressing requests from customers. They have to consider the available resources and product and business goals to come up with a strategy that stakeholders and customers will buy into.
But this often means making compromises. Launching new features may be prioritized over resolving minor bugs or feature requests may be set aside for a later sprint. When it comes to design, these compromises add up and start affecting the user experience and product metrics. This is when a product has design debt.
What is design debt?
Design debt is a concept used to describe the flaws and imperfections in a product’s design that accumulate over time.
It is the sum of all compromises or shortcuts that the development team made on product design during the development process. For example, a product owner may decide to not invest resources in making a SaaS solution responsive for mobile devices. Or a team may decide not to test parts of their product with users or not check the design consistency among different pages of a website.
Design debt is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes UI/UX designers have to make tough decisions based on the resources and the product goals. But the debt has to be managed effectively or it will start affecting the product, the users, and the brand over the long-term.
Are design debt and technical debt the same?
The phrase design debt owes its origins to technical debt and while there are similarities, they’re not the same. Technical debt refers to the shortcuts taken in all aspects of product development to reduce the time to release while design debt is about the UI and UX of the product. In most cases, technical debt usually comes from not testing well, using a simpler but less powerful or less flexible framework for development, or any other shortcuts taken during the development process.
Technical debt can make the product bloated, take more resources to maintain in the long run, or create an inefficient solution requiring extensive refactoring in the future.
On the other hand, design debt largely affects the user experience. For instance, when product development began, the team decided to focus only on mobile and developed a UI optimized for small screens. The product expanded and customers demanded a large screen interface. So the team decided to make minor changes to the mobile interface to make it work for PC and laptop screen. This saved time and resources for a complete redesign of the entire UI. But as development proceeds, adding new features becomes more complex and the UI breaks every now and then affecting the user experience.
What are the different types of design debt?
There are mainly three different types of design debt. Let’s have a look at what they are:
UX design debt
UX design debt is the sum of all design problems that make it difficult to use the product. For example, UI elements or page layouts may not be consistent across the product making it difficult to navigate to different pages or access different features. Or the team may not have spent enough resources on the onboarding process making it difficult for users to learn how to use the product.
Visual design debt
This type of design debt is largely about the appearance of the product. Visual design debt results in a product without a consistent design language and elements appearing out of place. For instance, buttons on one page may follow a flat design while they may be polymorphic on another page. There may even be inconsistencies in branding or fonts used throughout the product.
Operational design debt
Operational design debt is less about the product or how it impacts the users and more about the design processes and how they impact product development. For instance, sometimes the team jumps into designing the product before clearly defining design language or style guides.
Operational design debt slows the design process and makes it more prone to errors.
Where does design debt come from?
There are many ways a product may accrue design debt. Here are a few:
Not investing enough in design
When a team doesn’t have enough resources for design, they tend to compromise and take shortcuts. The teams may focus on just the bare essentials and ignore aspects like accessibility and user research. The team may also be forced to move directly to designing the UI without developing a design system or a comprehensive design language.
Rushing to launch new features quickly
Every new feature must be carefully evaluated and tested before launch. But when there is a rush to push new features, teams may not even consider if users may need it or how it may fit into the existing product. This may result in a product with a lot of features customers don’t use and many don’t even know exist.
Not having a comprehensive product strategy
Lack of a clear product strategy can result in significant design debt and resource wastage. The team won’t have a clear process to prioritize features or a clear timeline for the product. Product managers may set unrealistic timelines or focus on unnecessary features creating a Frankenstein product with huge design debt.
Not testing the design well
Testing is where most designers compromise when they don’t have enough resources or are facing tight deadlines. Without proper testing within the team and among users, a product will slowly accrue inconsistencies in design and bugs that hinder user experiences.
Poor communication among designers and developers
In many teams, there is a clean or sharp handover from design to developers. After the handover, the design team doesn’t oversee or test the implementation. Even with extensive documentation, this can create differences between the design and how it is implemented, especially when working on different platforms. Over time, these differences can affect the user experience and design inconsistencies across the product.
How does design debt affect your product?
Affects the user experience
As the design debt adds up, the product becomes disjointed and difficult to use. It can become less accessible and learning the product may take more time. Inconsistent layouts and navigation can confuse the users and they may start taking a lot of time for even the simplest tasks, or disrupting core workflows.
Eventually, the user engagement may go down and many may even move to other solutions. The team may also start getting a higher number of support requests.
Slows down the development process
Too much design debt can slow down product development. For instance, if the team did not invest in developing a design system or design framework, every change or iteration would have to be run through many team members. If there is no consistent layout for different pages of a website, even small changes could take an entire day to implement.
Operational design debt can also further cause delays in designing, testing, and implementing new features.
Prevents the product from reaching its goals
Design debt can slow down user acquisition, lower revenue per customer, and cause delays in the project timeline. It can result in resource wastage and prevent the business from reaching its goals with the product.
How do you know if your product is facing design debt?
One of the main indicators of design debt is poor user satisfaction. If you conduct regular user surveys and testing, you can notice a gradual drop in user satisfaction as design debt builds up. You may also notice changes in metrics such as user retention, time on task, and revenue per user.
As design debt adds up, you can also notice the maintenance cost going up. More bugs and errors may start popping up as the development progresses, each of them taking more resources to fix than the previous.
It will also become more difficult to develop and implement new features or changes. Every iteration may require extensive rework costing precious resources and causing delays. Design systems and frameworks that worked when the product was small and simple may start to struggle as the solution scales and adds new features.
Over time, the product may feel like a patchwork quilt made of disjointed elements getting worse as the development progresses.
Your team can also be a great indicator of design debt. As the debt builds, your team will be forced to focus more on fixing bugs and responding to user complaints instead of working on new features or growing the product. This will significantly affect the team morale.
How can you efficiently manage design debt?
Design debt is similar to monetary debt in many ways. It has to be paid off at some point and the more time you take to pay it off, the more interest you’ll end up paying. At the same time, some amount of design debt may be unavoidable to meet business goals. The key is to manage it with an efficient plan. Refactoring random elements of your product every now and then will not work and can even add to the debt.
Here’s how you can efficiently manage design debt:
1. Conduct regular audits
The first step is to figure out and make a list of where design debt lies. This is not the same as listing out all the design problems your product has. The focus should be on identifying elements built and decisions taken during the development process that are causing problems for users and will become bigger problems if left unchecked. These are usually design decisions that saved some resources in the short run or sped up the release a bit but have since then been patched up way too many times. These issues will also be taking up a lot of unnecessary resources even for minor changes or updates.
Take time to review and identify design patterns that can be combined or simplified, and update your design system accordingly. If you don’t have a design system built, there is no time like the present. Design systems are a game changer for integrating UX into the development process. Not utilizing and maintaining a design system can severely impact the time it takes to create designs. It can also lead to inconsistencies within your product, confuse your users, and increase the amount of time it takes for the development team to build new features. Not sure where to start? Here’s some design system inspiration.
2. Prioritize and plan
It may not make sense to tackle the entire list all at once. It could slow down product development to a complete halt.
Prioritize what to fix based on how much it is affecting the user experience or slowing down the design process and the effort it will take to manage them. Taking input from your team and other stakeholders can help you make good decisions at this stage. It’s a good idea to allocate a portion of your team’s time every sprint to addressing technical and design debt.
3. Execute and iterate
Once you have a plan, start removing the design debt. Keeping track of the changes and the impact they have on user experience and business metrics can help you better manage your debt.
Struggling with design debt?
Design debt can be tricky to manage. It can often take a lot of resources to fix which may be taken away from product development. However, as time goes on and development proceeds further, the cost of refactoring the debt only increases. At the same time, the user experience becomes worse and the team starts receiving more customer queries and complaints.
Therefore, product teams need a robust strategy to tackle and manage backlog.Â
LunarLab has been working with product teams in a wide variety of industries and has helped them solve their design problems. Our team can help you audit your product, the development process itself, and come up with a strong strategy to manage design debt.
