The term "UX debt" can be misleading and may make you think that it's not important for your organization. However, it may be hiding the problems that your users face daily. Look at this practical guide that explains how to recognize, address, and manage these UX shortcomings.
"UX debt" is a term often encountered in large IT projects. These projects involve investing in new products and expanding the functionality of the old ones, ultimately resulting in a growing set of new features. On the other hand, new technologies are simultaneously implemented to consistently bring about these changes, ensuring that customers are served quickly and efficiently. The leadership is satisfied with the results, and everything looks good - on paper.
However, it's essential to understand that without reassessing the user experience in conjunction with these fast-paced changes, they may undermine how users perceive your product. Software engineers and product managers have long been concerned about technical debt for good reason, but less about UX debt. When they put off necessary design rework and changes with an "I'll handle it later" attitude, those UX issues can quickly accumulate. If left unaddressed, this accumulation can cause a domino effect, creating severe usability issues.
In short, UX debt can wreak havoc on a product if it's not properly managed. Therefore, it's crucial to balance business imperatives and usability requirements when scaling a product.
I/ Why do organizations fail to manage UX debt?
The word "debt" usually implies owing something to someone. It means that you received something from someone and failed to pay it back at some point. In the context of user experience, "UX debt" refers to unresolved user experience issues in your digital product that have accumulated over time. In this case, the people you owe something are your users.
It may seem unlikely for a company to intentionally generate user dissatisfaction by identifying usability issues, but the reality is not that simple. Even organizations that are market and client-oriented and forward-looking in terms of adopting new technology can fall victim to UX debt. As it happens with tech debt, UX debt is mostly always there. This type of debt can creep in unnoticed, leading to a build-up of usability issues over time.
Recognizing the existence of UX debt means acknowledging that the user experience you provide isn't optimal. However, keeping track of your UX debt isn't necessarily a negative thing. It shows that you're aware that you're not delivering your best UX value but you have plans to address this problem later.
UX debt is a problem that affects enterprise products that have intricate and diverse user tasks to perform. It arises especially when they have multiple layers, segments, and functionalities. The complexity of such apps is illustrated in this graphic by the Nielsen Norman Group:
The more complex the app processes, the greater the likelihood of UX debt for larger companies. But which companies and what type of systems are most prone to UX debt?:
Enterprises with multi-tiered applications
Solutions for specialized users performing wide-ranging, nonhomogeneous tasks
Legacy systems that are long in operation
Platforms subject to frequently changing ownership
Corporate systems affected by high organizational complexity
Products with a multitude of domain-specific user activities
Applications with multi-phase workflows
Organizations processing large amounts of data for user display.
Now you know who is at risk of not keeping their UX promises. But how do experienced companies end up in this situation?
Product evolution: firstly, products evolve like a living organism: successive changes build up unintentional usability issues. What worked before may no longer be the most viable solution today, hence this accumulation of UX debt. Secondly, outdated software produces a mix of UX problems, maintenance issues, security breaches, and complexity. That's why Lehman’s laws of software evolution remind us to reassess it periodically.
Business and market priorities: ignoring long-term company strategy and giving priority only to business and market demands can lead to UX debt. Neglecting usability adjustments in favor of new features can result in a Frankenstein app, which may cause performance issues and navigation problems for users. Postponed usability adjustments will catch up to you sooner or later.
Lack of quality assurance: users may face difficulties interacting with your software due to insufficient or ineffective Quality Assurance (QA) processes. QA is important because it helps detect any hidden bugs in your software and ensures the code is adequately tested. A shortage of testers can affect the entire workflow of your website or application. Poor QA can also reveal any unaddressed user experience issues that were released to production without proper quality checks.
Shortage of up-to-date user insights: are you up-to-date with your users’ needs? Do you have proof that you serve your user's expectations by giving them a voice through tests and interviews? Executives often assume their market experience removes the need for user reassessment as their business grows. However, putting unverified assumptions ahead of users’ needs is a grave mistake.
Scaling without usability analysis: usability analysis is as crucial for mature enterprises as for startups. It is essential to stay updated with the latest user requirements when scaling a product. Neglecting this rule is often the cause of UX debt especially in established organizations, despite its simplicity. While adding new features, it's essential to reassess the old ones for usability.
Breaking established user habits: users' needs and expectations change with time, and their product-related habits can become fixed routines. As users develop routines and habits while using your software, it is crucial to ensure that their activities in the system remain seamless. Disrupting their established routines by adding new features without proper usability assessment can cause confusion and sabotage conversions.
II/What are the different areas falling under UX debt?
Jack Moffett from UXPin has categorized UX debt into five categories: technical debt, functional debt, behavioral debt, visual debt, and documentation debt. In this section, we will use his categorization to explain how to identify and tackle various usability issues more effectively.
Behavior debt
Behavior debt is a type of User Experience (UX) debt that relates to the functionality of the User Interface (UI) in your application or website. When assessing this type of UX debt, it's important to consider three key aspects that can affect the behavior of the layout:
The time it takes to operate the tools - if your app is outdated, it may take longer due to too many buttons and tabs.
The uniformity of the design - it's essential to ensure that the layout is consistent across all app segments.
Conventions in the UI - it's important to establish layout consistencies that users are familiar with.
Functional debt
Functional debt refers to anything that hinders the functionality of your enterprise product. This can include misjudged priority functionalities, outdated integrations, or operational shortcomings caused by an Information Architecture that includes too many unaccounted-for functionalities in navigation and content. Moffett also highlights the importance of scalable UI design. To accommodate a growing number of users, it is crucial to build products that can function well, even during demand spikes. This means creating a flexible interface from the start, as noted by André Oliveira.
Tech debt
Tech debt is a term used to describe any technical deficiencies in software that have been overlooked or neglected. These issues can range from poor-quality code and low-performance scores to bugs. Addressing tech debt usually requires strong collaboration between developers, QA specialists, and UX designers, as the problem can originate from both frontend and backend. Moffett identifies frontend debt as issues with browser version support, obsolete HTML, unresponsive frameworks, and unclean code. Backend debt, on the other hand, encompasses problems with performance, hardware, databases, and security.
Visual debt
Visual debt is related to the effectiveness of your platform's User Interface (UI) design. Although visual deficiencies affect the way your app or website is perceived, they can result from both significant and minor errors that, when added up, lead to a negative experience and discourage users from using your platform. In this context, let's examine the most common visual mistakes.
Graphic UI components: As your app ages, we often notice that static UI components (buttons, bars, borders, title areas, etc) cover a major portion of the layout, negatively impacting your product's functionality. This phenomenon, known as chrome accumulation, leads to finding a balance between delightful UI for users and efficient UX allowing them to take action.
Iconography: Poor iconographic design may appear to be a minor mistake, but it can lead to significant confusion and inconsistency in established applications. Moffett even suggests that it is the most serious visual debt violation. The Nielsen Norman Group cautions against making these common mistakes when designing icons. For example, don’t use icons that already have another set meaning, or evoke broad, esoteric connotations. It would be best to avoid cryptic icons or repeatedly placed in lists.
Visual consistency: Visual consistency in color, typography, layout, and style is an essential aspect of providing a high-quality user experience, as highlighted by Moffett. Therefore, it should never be overlooked when addressing UX debt. Consistency is one of Nielsen's ten fundamental usability heuristics that is often disregarded. Anton Nikolov, a contributor to UX Collective, notes that visual consistency is essential as it allows users to learn the system more easily when similar parts of the design look and function alike.
Branding: According to Moffett, branding is closely tied to communication between internal departments like Product Design and Marketing. Therefore, any changes these departments make must be communicated early across the organization to ensure everyone follows the same up-to-date brand guidelines.
UI Copywriting: Copywriting is an essential aspect of user interface design, and it is crucial to pay attention to labels and notifications. According to Moffett, poor UI copy can mislead users, leading to a waste of time in taking action. To avoid such mistakes, it is essential to steer clear of UI copy errors such as cryptic typos, unsympathetic error communications, unlearnable shortcuts, and grammatical errors.
Documentation debt
While documentation debt is usually associated with code that needs proper documentation, in design, it is translated into a lack of UX assets inventory. Maintaining an inventory of the design team's ideation and UX steps in documentation helps other teams rely on it for guidance. This way, they don't waste time investigating the design motivations behind the product's design patterns. In this context, it is crucial to record the UX assets and the rationale behind the earlier decisions, to limit the level of UX debt.
A comprehensive set of your UX resources should include the following elements: design requirement brief, User documentation (user personas, user interview report, etc), competitive analysis, experience mapping, sketches, wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes, usability testing reports, design specifications, style guides.
III/ How to solve UX debt once identified:
Despite team efforts to eliminate UX debt by implementing UX strategies, it is still challenging to manage it as many factors must be aligned to minimize it. From my experience as a cybersecurity product designer, it's impossible to avoid all user experience issues due to the constantly changing product environment, and shifting user habits.
But that doesn't mean team efforts to minimize UX debt are useless. Facilitating fast and informed decisions is key in the cybersecurity industry. We aim to simplify without oversimplifying and responsibly expose complexity. Instead of trying to eliminate it once and for all, it's better to adopt the best UX debt practices as an ongoing routine. By doing so, you can stay informed about the issues that arise and prevent them from accumulating over time.
Earlier this year, we had to redefine the interface and taxonomy of our Cloud Security product to strike the right balance between simplicity and sophistication. During this process, we constantly asked ourselves the following questions:
- Is the experience as simple as it can be?
- Have we eliminated unnecessary complexity?
- Have we removed too much complexity?
- Can users still access the necessary insights in just a few clicks?
- Are we helping users remediate security issues efficiently?
Our ultimate goal as a team, is to ensure that it is easy and intuitive to identify specific or cross-product UX issues over time and to prioritize them appropriately while scaling the product with as little friction as possible. This isn't an easy task: we had to review and create new common patterns, contextualized taxonomy, and risk nomenclature to drive stickiness and adoption.
Below, I've included the easiest way to tackle UX debt. Of course, those few steps are just one approach of the several ones to handle it impactfully.
1- Listing usability issues
Create a backlog to monitor usability issues. This helps prioritize them later on and identify areas needing attention. A backlog also helps keep track of UX debt and reveals areas for improvement in daily project routines. First and foremost, it's important to identify the root cause of the UX debt. Was it a result of launching the product too quickly? Did conflicting instructions contribute to the issue? Or, was it due to taking a different approach because of time or technical constraints? Ignoring the source of the debt will only exacerbate the problem.
One possible way to tackle this is to create a shared spreadsheet that can be accessed by all teams involved in the product assessment. This will allow everyone to assess the product as a group and work towards resolving the issue together. I also suggest reviewing your product based on the following criteria, if possible: findability, accessibility, clarity of communication, usefulness, credibility, learnability, overall aesthetics, and persuasive design.
2- Classifying UX issues into subcategories
It is imperative to classify UX problems based on the scale of work required and their impact on your system. It is impossible to tackle all UX issues in one or a few sprints. Therefore, you need to prioritize them by selecting quick-win opportunities, optimization candidates, redesign elements, or any other relevant matrix that classifies the characteristics of necessary changes. This step is crucial before allocating any resources to tackle the problems.
3- Prioritizing UX issues efficiently
Minor usability issues can gradually become a part of your workflow and pile up. Although these issues may not seem like a big deal initially, their accumulation can lead to a messy interface. Therefore, it is recommended to keep track of these issues using the same system you use for major problems. You can prioritize these UX issues based on their level of importance: this can be achieved by breaking them down into smaller parts and leveraging the value and effort matrix to combine business imperatives and user perspectives and give a clear priority.
The MoSCoW prioritization technique is another helpful approach for categorizing items into four priority groups: must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and won't-haves. The must-haves and should-haves are given priority, while the could-haves are considered optional. The won't-haves refer to those items that will be addressed in future phases.
IV/ Conclusion:
"UX debt" may sound intimidating, but it's a common problem where unresolved usability issues negatively impact the overall customer experience. Poor UX quality can lead to users feeling stuck with your product, ultimately resulting in a cost to your organization. To avoid this, it's important to view managing user experience issues as a constant responsibility and long-term commitment for the entire organization, rather than a one-time improvement project.
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