What is UX Debt and How to Avoid It?

“Some debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them.”

— Ogden Nash

We are all familiar with the concept of debt. At any point in our lives, we might have to borrow some money from somebody or some institution, like a bank, so it happens sometimes. When it comes to paying the debt, the process might seem challenging in many ways. For example, when you pay your debts to the bank, you generally pay the interest. Therefore, typically, the debt you have created includes more than what you borrow.

This example is presented here for you to have a depiction of UX debt in your mind throughout this writing. After explaining what UX debt is, we will introduce you to identifying and solving the UX debt.

What Is UX Debt?

UX debt means the accumulation of fast and easy solutions that result in a negative user experience. Generally, the main motive to come up with a fast and easy solution to the product is the pressure to launch the product in the short term, or lack of resources. Therefore, your team sacrifices creating the optimal solution that takes more time. Agile teams are especially expected to develop quick solutions and new features in a short duration, forcing the agile teams to commit UX debt frequently. Regardless of whether these solutions are intentional or not, those accumulate over time and become a problem. Therefore, “debt” refers to those once fast and easy solutions you have to pay, including their “interests,” in the future.

Remember the example we give above: you pay for what you borrow from the bank with an interest rate. This situation also applies to the UX debt. As your team chooses shortcut solutions immediately to tackle user experience problems instead of elaborative solutions, those problems and their shortcuts will cost more to the company when it comes to fixing them later.

UX debt is adapted from the term “tech debt.” Tech debt, which was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992, states that it is always better to choose an ideal solution before the product is launched over shortcut solutions that lead to a fast launching process. The reason is fixing the problems after the product is launched will cost more time and resources. Like tech debt, the term “UX debt” is created to define the process of prioritizing shortcut solutions to the user experience over optimal solutions. As those shortcuts accumulate, it is inevitable to create a negative user experience. Therefore, fixing a pile of shortcuts requires more time and resources in the end.

Why is fixing a UX shortcut solution after launching is more expensive than creating the optimal solution in the first place?

There are several reasons for that:

• Going back to what once has been launched creates an unnecessary challenge on both the designers and coders because they have to re-do every process and spend time figuring out what has been done a long time ago.
• When your product is launched, it is crucial to create a good first impression on the users to have loyal customers. However, if the users do not have a good user experience in the first place, they do not probably give a second chance to your product. Therefore, because of not fulfilling the product’s full potential in the first place, you will have churned users, which adds to the cost of “paying” UX debt later.
• Users do not like their habits to be changed. If you create changes for your product, you have to have concrete reasons. However, changing the features due to UX debt is not among those concrete reasons because you might have done it before launching the product.

Types of UX Debt

There are two types of UX debt:

1) Intentional UX Debt

This type of UX debt is the result of the UX solutions that are created deliberately because of not having enough time or resources in the first place. Another reason for the intentional UX debt is concentrating on presenting new features for gaining market share. In this regard, your team plans to resolve the intentional UX debt at a later sprint to gain market share. Intentional UX debt generally occurs, so what you can do is try to keep it as minimum as possible.

2) Unintentional UX Debt

This type of UX debt occurs naturally as opposed to intentional UX debt. The main reason for unintentional UX debt is that as time passes, things will change. The users’ preferences and needs transform over time, so your product should adopt these transformations. When your company does not realize the evolving expectations from your users, it starts to create unintentional UX debt. You should constantly check for unintentional UX debt because it is avoidable.

How to Identify UX Debt?

Until now, we have guided you through the concepts about UX debt. You are acknowledged by the fact that UX debt is inevitable. Now, it is time to discuss how to implement what you have read so far, identifying UX debt.

Step 1: Create a UX Debt Inventory

To tackle the UX debt, you should first know where the pile is. The best approach to target the UX debt is creating an inventory.

First, you can use your product yourself as the other team members do the same. While using your product, you can target the aspects you find unintuitive and complicated and take notes. At this point, a collaborative spreadsheet might be used by your team members so that no issue will be missed.

Susan Rector and Kim Dunwoody suggest the categories below to keep in mind while your team members are going through the product:

• Findability

• Accessibility

• Clarity of Communication

• Usefulness

• Credibility

• Learnability

• Overall Aesthetics

• Persuasive Design

It is important to note that you are not your target users. Therefore, while creating the inventory, try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes as much as possible. Also, adding user feedback to the equation is always helpful.

Step 2: Prioritization:

Creating an inventory that reveals the UX debt would not be very meaningful if you do not take action. You might face a massive pile of UX debt, and you probably want to procrastinate. However, we know that procrastination doesn’t really help when tackling UX debt.

The approach, which will help you handle the pile of UX debt, is going step by step. In this regard, prioritizing some of your debt based on two criteria makes the UX debt more manageable:

• How crucial the issue is and its impact: The issues that are major and create a severe impact on the user experience should be the top priority to be tackled.
• How long fixing the issue takes: Based on estimations, you figure how much time is needed to correct the problem. Then, you should decide which issue should be tackled first. For instance, if the issue is likely to take a great amount of time, you might delay it until similar issues arise.

Step 3: Schedule:

Based on your inventory, a schedule should be arranged to include the prioritizations for the coming sprints. Scheduling the cleanup of the debt is then followed by the last step, resolving UX debt.

Resolving UX Debt

After fully identifying the UX debt, it is time to pay down those debts, which is the most challenging part of the process. Your team should dedicate themselves to tackle UX debt regularly. Every team works differently, so choosing among several approaches to resolve UX debt is up to your team.

One of the most common approaches indicates an exact number of story points to resolve UX debt each sprint or every other sprint. Another most common approach is determining a specific time of the year to resolve UX debt, such as every quarter.

During resolving UX debt, it is important to include stakeholders and members of leadership on board besides the designer team because of showing them the value of resolving the UX debt throughout the process. Also, informing the other members of the executives throughout the process should be achieved with easy and clear explanations to ensure that they understand the importance of the process.

🔥 Key Takeaways 🔥

👉UX debt is caused by shortcut solutions to the user issues instead of optimal solutions due to time or resource constraints. It results in a negative user experience.

👉Like every other debt, UX debt should be paid, but paying for it will be much more complicated as time passes.

👉There are two types of UX debt: intentional and unintentional.

👉There are 3 steps to identify UX debt: creating a UX debt inventory, prioritization, and schedule.

👉There are several different approaches for a team to tackle UX debt.

👉The designer team should prove the value of resolving UX debt to the executive members and stakeholders.