Avoiding Design Debt: Building products people actually want
Picture this: You’ve invested months of blood, sweat, and tears (and a good chunk of budget) into developing a new product. You’ve got a team of brilliant minds and a Figma design that looks slick. But when you launch, crickets. What went wrong?
You might be facing a classic case of design debt. Think of it as the product development equivalent of buying someone a fancy sports car without checking first if they know how to drive or even if there is a paved road around. It may look great, but it’s not going to get them anywhere (and you just wasted a massive bunch of money).
What exactly is Design Debt?
It’s the buildup of nasty assumptions and misfires that happens when you spend too much time in the lab and not enough time on the street. It’s what happens when your team falls in love with their own ideas, research artefacts and designs, instead of listening to what real users actually want and need in real life.
In another words
The accumulation of misaligned features and solutions that result from prioritizing theoretical design over empirical evidence gathered from real users interacting with the live product. This debt is often incurred when extensive ideation and design phases are conducted in isolation, relying on assumptions and hypothetical scenarios rather than the actual behaviour and feedback of users engaging with the product in their natural environment.
Our approach: Build, Learn, Repeat
At Everest, we’ve seen firsthand how design debt can derail even the most promising projects. That’s why we take a different approach. We believe in getting a working product into the hands of real users as quickly as possible. Then, we listen. We learn. And we iterate. We call it our “build-to-learn”, and it’s saved our clients a lot of headaches (and money).
An example: from failure to continuous learning
One of our clients came to us with a product that was drowning in design debt. They’d followed all the “best practices,” but the result was a version of Frankenstein’s monster that definitely wasn’t resonating with users.
We helped them shift gears, moving away from lengthy planning phases and focusing instead on rapid iteration and continuous user feedback. As a cross-functional team, we broke down the problem space into manageable chunks, clearly defining what each iteration of the product would achieve and what specific learnings we hoped to gain. By getting a functional version of the product in front of real users as quickly as possible, we were able to gather invaluable insights and rapidly course-correct, ensuring the final product truly aligned with their needs.
Showing by doing a new way to build products was a critical way to change our client’s way of working and help their broader product teams focus on value and not on features, avoiding accumulating nasty product debt.
The takeaway: don’t let design debt sabotage your product
The lesson here is simple: don’t let your product become a victim of design debt. Here’s how to avoid it:
- Get real: Talk to your users early and often. But don’t just rely on research and user testing. Get your product in their hands and see how they really use it in the real context.
- Think small: Break down your product into manageable pieces and test them iteratively. You want to learn and make small course corrections along the way instead of having to overhaul the entire thing later.
- Work together: Foster collaboration between your product, design, and engineering teams. A siloed approach is a recipe for design debt disaster.
- Keep learning: Never stop listening to your users and gathering feedback. The world is constantly changing, and your product needs to evolve with it.
Remember, the best products are the ones that solve real problems for real people. By following these tips, you can avoid design debt and build products that truly make a difference.
