Design Debt: The Hidden Cost of Neglecting UX Investment, and How to Measure and Manage It

This is not one more article about design debt. This is a practical guide to help you measure and manage your current design debt. Including actionable steps to transform your business or solution into a user-centered success.

What is Design Debt?

Debt is a figure of speech to illustrate the effort needed to fix errors and quality deficits that were introduced during development and are affecting the business value. Therefore, design debt is intrinsically connected to technical debt since it accounts for the accumulation of both design and development decisions that have negatively affected the product and therefore the end-user experience.

And you can quantify and prioritize your design debt into 4 levels:

1 — UX Design Debt
2 — Operational Design Debt
3 — Visual Design Debt
4 — Testing and Research Debt

UX Design Debt — This type of debt has a direct implication for the business goals because it impacts negatively adoption rates, learnability, discoverability, and integrity of the user flow which will directly affect general customer satisfaction.

Operational Design Debt — Operational design debt occurs when there is a poor underlying structure and/or inefficient process or governmental models to support good ways of working for better design and development teams’ work. To reduce operational debt the first step is understanding the shortcomings of underlying structures and processes. This requires listening to your team carefully, gathering feedback about design organization within your company, and, if you are a manager, noticing clues from your reports during 1on1s. Things that can contribute to operational design debt are lack of a design system; Lack of accessible components; Outdated design files or inconsistent with the implementation; Messy design file organization that is difficult to work with (no styles and components, flat structure, etc., which force designers to rebuild elements from scratch or spend time cleaning up existing files before starting a project); And last but not least, weak designer-developer workflow and communication.

Visual Design Debt — This type of debt takes into account the UI inconsistencies of the product interface like colors, typography, grids, etc. The extreme is when system parts have such an incongruous look and feel they seem to come from another product. This debt undermines the product’s credibility by making it look less trustworthy and professional. Analyzing visual inconsistencies in the product requires a cross-team effort to get complete and credible results.

Testing and Research Debt — Failing to prioritize and support UX research to inform and drive the product decision will just open the door to high volumes of testing and research debt. The absence of user testing will result in a bad UX, leading to lower engagement and product adoption, customer churn, and a higher bounce rate. A product is doomed to failure if there has been no user research.

What are the 10 symptoms of design debt?

1. Your product is growing slowly: Your product is not keeping up with the pace of your competitors or user demands, and it is hindering your ability to grow your business.
2. You have customer complaints: Your users are experiencing issues or frustration with your product, leading to negative reviews or feedback.
3. Your teams are unhappy: Your team members are dissatisfied with the design process or the end product, leading to low morale and productivity.
4. The experience feels inconsistent: Your product lacks consistency in design or functionality, leading to confusion and frustration for users.
5. Your adoption is dropping: Your user adoption rate is decreasing, indicating that your product is not meeting user needs or expectations.
6. You are growing teams, not scaling capabilities: Your team is growing in size, but your design capabilities or processes are not keeping up, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in working together.
7. It’s hard to introduce new features: Your product has a complicated design or codebase, making it challenging to introduce new features or make changes without breaking existing functionality.
8. Onboarding takes a long time: Your product onboarding process is too complex or time-consuming, leading to a poor user experience and potential abandonment.
9. Your backlog is full of good ideas that you struggle to execute: Your team has a backlog of design improvements or feature requests, but it is difficult to prioritize or execute them effectively.
10. High maintenance costs: Your product requires frequent updates or maintenance, and the costs associated with maintaining and updating the design are becoming increasingly high.

10 reasons why should you measure design debt?

1. Identify design issues: Measuring design debt can help you identify UX problems and poor design standards to address specific design-related issues that are impacting your user experience and causing usability problems.
2. Prioritize design improvements: By understanding the magnitude of your design debt you can learn how to use design debt strategically by prioritizing which design improvements to tackle first, focusing on those that have the most significant impact on user experience.
3. Quantify the impact of design debt: Measuring design debt can help you quantify the impact of design issues on your business, such as lost revenue or decreased user satisfaction to align your resources to achieve better experiences and business results.
4. Align design and business goals: Measuring design debt can help you align your design and business goals, ensuring that design improvements are targeted toward business objectives. This will help you get better buy-in from your leadership, upper management, and stakeholders.
5. Track design improvements: Measuring design debt over time can help you track the progress of design improvements and determine whether is decreasing or increasing. In the long term will change your organization's culture around the business value of design (design ROI).
6. Make informed design decisions: Measuring design debt can provide data-driven insights that enable you to make informed design decisions that are based on user needs and business goals. And learn how to incorporate design debt in your development roadmap.
7. Improve collaboration: Measuring design debt can facilitate collaboration between design and development teams, helping them work together more effectively to improve the user experience.
8. Reduce technical debt: Measuring design debt can help you identify technical debt that is impacting your product’s performance or maintainability, allowing you to address these issues more effectively.
9. Enhance user satisfaction: Measuring design debt can lead to improvements in the user experience, enhancing user satisfaction, and loyalty.
10. Increase revenue: Measuring design debt and improving the user experience can lead to increased user engagement, conversion rates, and revenue, making it a crucial factor in driving business success.

How to calculate design debt then?

My suggestion is to follow a UX audit + Design debt calculation approach. For example, you can choose to run a UX audit based on the 10 Nielsen’s Heuristics or choose to use 247 Usability Guidelines from UserFocus.

In this example, I choose to use the 10 Nielson’s Heuristics.

After you list your heuristics star run an assessment if your solution is or isn’t compliant with the heuristic. Like this:

And how to assess the right value? Follow the logic of this diagram to assess how big is the problem.

Now, you have to connect the above criteria to a score in order to produce a measurement. For example:

What turns this approach special, is that serves as a diagnostic method to help designs and product managers measure both pragmatic and hedonic qualities for calculating the design investment opportunities through the prioritization of design debt efforts. This translates into the most effective way to measure design debt because it does not only look at the user interface properties (usability) like most of the design debt calculators available in the market do. But also measures the attitudes like the perception of ease of use, usefulness, and satisfaction. This brings a unique analysis to measure the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of the digital product.

After conducting a UX audit and obtaining a projected score, the next step is to evaluate the trade-off between UX quality and the development effort required to fix any identified issues. This assessment considers the impact that fixing each issue would have on user value and business performance. The goal is to prioritize “quick wins” by focusing on issues that require a low effort but have a high impact on the user experience. By doing so, you can maximize the return on investment of your design efforts and improve the user experience in a cost-effective manner. And how can you do that?

In this section, you will be assessing the severity of the problem for the user according to its frequency. For the design trad-offs, you will be measuring the issue’s effectiveness. Prioritization happens by analyzing the effort it takes to fix an issue and comparing it with the impact it will have on the user experience. This data can help you generate an Impact Effort Matrix, which will help you brings everyone on your team or organization to the same page for working towards a goal.

This will help you create a solid action plan for the data generated on the impact effort matrix, like this for example:

The final piece of this assessment is to understand how much you can pay off. I call it “Total Paydown” and this can be calculated based on the assessment selection and the projection you and your team made to solve the issue. For example, once you’ve calculated the “UX Outcomes”, update the ‘projected assessment’ column with plans to solve the heuristic problem. For example, will heuristic A1 will be solved h in the next sprint to meet the heuristic criteria?

The total design debt is the debt calculation before the paydown is added. Paydown is calculated based on the project paydown.

Design debt is not limited to heuristics compliance alone. It can also result from deficiencies in user research and testing, as well as in your overall design process. Therefore, when calculating your final design debt score, it’s important to consider other important dimensions that provide a more comprehensive picture of your total design debt, like:

• User Research (Formative Testing) — Does user testing done early in product development?
• User Testing (Summative Testing) — Is the solution completed with summative testing?
• Design System — Is the solution built with a design system?
• Accessibility — Does the solution fail to take into account accessibility?
• Analytics — Does the solution tracks the product’s usage?
• Company Branding — Does the solution implement the company brand?

By taking a holistic approach to design debt, you can identify and address all underlying issues that contribute to poor user experiences and improve the overall quality of your product.

Design debt analysis

All the previous design debt analysis data can be used to make a thorough evaluation of the areas where your product is struggling the most. By breaking down your overall volume of design debt, you can identify specific areas where improvements are needed and develop an action plan to seek investment and address these issues.

It’s important to understand how poor user experience is costing your business and your users, both in terms of lost revenue and decreased satisfaction. By prioritizing the areas with the most significant impact on user experience and business performance, you can ensure that your investment in design debt reduction provides the greatest return on investment. Through ongoing monitoring and evaluation, you can continue to improve the user experience and reduce design debt over time.

If you’re looking for a tool to help you streamline your design debt reduction efforts, you can use my Excel Design Debt Calculator. This tool is designed to assess your product’s UX quality enabling you to easily identify gaps in user experience and customer satisfaction through data.

With the Excel calculator, you can track your progress over time and set goals for improving your product’s UX maturity while simultaneously reducing design debt. By using this tool to conduct internal audit assessments, you can make informed decisions that lead to better user engagement and satisfaction. You can download the calculator for free at https://jcerejo.com/ux-calculators/design-debt-calculator.