What is UX debt and how do you repay it?
Almost all digital products carry some form of UX debt. How much and how easy it is to ‘pay off’ will vary depending on the product. Read on to find out more about what UX debt is and how best to manage it.
Table of contents
What is UX debt?
Maybe you’ve heard of the concept of ‘technical debt’? It’s the idea that digital products will require work in the future. It is often to address issues or shortcomings resulting from working at speed (and taking shortcuts!) in the past. In other words, rush a product to market and you’ll be storing up issues that will need fixing later on, costing you more time and resources.
UX debt is that same idea applied to the user experience, which is to say how the user accesses the product, the actions they take while using it, how they perceive it, and how they feel about it. The greater the UX debt, the less positive the user experience and sooner or later, that will cost you users and reputation.
Like technical debt, a certain amount of UX debt is inevitable as a product goes through its life cycle – as it is developed further to meet new needs, reach new target audiences, and offer new functions. In fact, there are two types of UX debt:
- the first is intentional UX debt: debt knowingly accrued because the deadline for release, or adding new features is the priority. You know you’re storing up UX debt and you plan to deal with it at a later stage of development.
- the other type is unintentional UX debt: a lack of positive user experience caused by you not realizing that users’ needs or preferences are changing over time.
Intentional UX debt is a conscious planning choice; unintentional UX debt is an avoidable failure to plan.
UX debt can be minimized by ensuring that as you reassess and refactor the product’s functionality, you do the same for the user’s experience.
Which scenarios are most prone to UX debt?
While a certain amount of intentional UX debt is inevitable, there are types of product and organization for which UX debt tends to be more likely:
- Multi-tiered enterprise applications are vulnerable, often due to their sheer size and complexity.
- Legacy systems that have arguably been in use too long, overdue for refactoring or replacement.
- Products with a variety of domain-specific activities – again, it’s a complexity issue.
- Organizations (or apps/platforms) that change ownership and/or strategic direction.
- Organizations seeking rapid expansion of markets and target audiences.
What’s more, certain development practices (or errors) can lead to unnecessary UX debt, usually as a result of pushing too hard for a completed or marketable product:
- Insufficient user testing resulting in a lack of understanding of what users want from the product.
- Ignoring the established branding, style guide or design system.
- Lack of clarity on the product vision (or not paying enough attention to it during the development process).
- Insufficient quality assurance testing.
How to handle UX debt the right way
The first step is knowing what you’re dealing with so to begin, keep track of UX issues. Ensure that any problems relating to the product’s user experience are recorded in the product backlog. Not only does this mean you won’t forget them, but the record also enables you to monitor, track, and spot any trends or patterns. Then, you can prioritize actions that you will take.
Adopt as broad a UX perspective as possible to ensure you’re identifying the full range of UX debt issues. However you search out UX debt, ask yourself if the product is:
- Findable
- Accessible
- Useful
- Credible
- Clear in its communication
- Learnable
- Persuasive (i.e. users want to use it)
- Esthetically pleasing
How do you prioritize UX debt? One way to start is to establish different categories of issue. For example, some issues relate to optimization of the product and reflect a need to adjust the code, others require a more comprehensive redesign of a feature or function.
Another category worth having is ‘quick wins’ for issues that can be fixed rapidly and with a relative minimum of effort or resource. Your categories may differ depending on your organization and the product itself but the principle of categorization helps you see what you’re dealing with.
Once you have your categorized UX debt issues, you can decide on priorities for action. This might be by way of a simple value/resource matrix (the solutions to some issues will give you more value or benefit than others; likewise, the time, energy, resource and skill needed to address issues will vary).
One plus here… if you use an Agile development process then you’re probably used to working in sprints, focused on rapidly tackling specific features or issues, driven by a product backlog. By recording your UX debt items in the backlog, you’re using an existing system and proven way of working to address the product’s UX debt.
UX debt tools that you should know about
A variety of existing product development tools and techniques (especially those relating to the user experience) can be used to minimize or identify and tackle UX debt; for example:
- Product vision/discovery workshops – Early in the development process, a focus on user experience and user needs effectively means the whole team is considering potential UX debt issues from the start.
- Stakeholder mapping – Knowing who has an interest in and/or influence over the product tells you who you need to satisfy or convince when it comes to UX issues.
- Product canvas – This tool focuses design (or redesign) efforts on users, user groups, user journeys, etc.
- User analytics and testing – Tools such as Hotjar allow you to analyze how users interact with the product, using heatmaps and session recordings, you can how users navigate and identify any areas or features which are a problem, or just not being used as intended by the original design. Likewise, any user or usability tests offer the opportunity to focus on UX debt.
- Code & UX audit – An in-depth code audit should include examination of the user experience, unearthing any issues around user satisfaction.
Why tackling UX debt is better done sooner than later
A poor user experience can be fatal for a product, or at least it will never reach its full market potential. Identifying and addressing UX debt is essentially all about optimizing the user experience. This is true, especially in relation to problems or issues caused by shortcuts in the initial development process.
A small amount of UX debt is inevitable but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t minimize it or tackle it. Like any other type of debt, the longer you leave it, the more it will cost you. In the case of UX debt, that cost may be the time and effort needed to fix an issue, but there’s also a cost in lost or dissatisfied users and the impact on the product’s/your brand reputation.
Luckily, if you use an Agile product development process, you already have a mechanism in place to tackle UX debt. Don’t hesitate to use it - your users will thank you for it later.
Share this article:
