Managing design debt in enterprise software
Design debt is something I’ve seen come up often when talking about team collaboration and design handoff.
Similar to its namesake, technical debt, design debt refers to the cumulative negative impact on user experience due to hasty or compromised design decisions. It's created when corners are cut to get to production at the expense of the user experience.
While your team may decide any one of these design elements or steps is acceptable to skip, over time these add up to significantly degrade your users' experience.
Michal Mazur has a great Medium post further defining and exploring the concept here.
Why is enterprise software so susceptible to design debt?
All too often, enterprise applications maintain an extensive backlog of design debt — whether or not that debt has been identified. This is particularly challenging for teams building tools in-house, but it can plague SaaS companies as well when UX is not a priority. Why?
Sometimes just getting the job done is the goal. The buyer or executive sponsor may not prioritize design & usability; their main concern is basic competency and cost to develop/purchase.
Teams often work under tight timelines driven by business constraints, which can lead to a compromise on design improvements or user research.
If the engineers are not frontend specialists, visual design may take a back seat, resulting in a clunky, inconsistent user experience over time.
Strategies to manage design debt
Write UX bugs
Calling out design improvements/fixes as "UX bugs" can help get your engineering team on board and prioritize these issues. This can also make the UX issues you’ve identified feel more concrete for your team.
Create a design debt backlog
Once you’ve documented your UX bugs, you can track these design debt items on an ongoing basis. On some teams I've been on, we devoted two hours a week to working through this backlog and working together to prioritize what we addressed first.
Pair with your engineering squad
Spend time sitting with the engineers are your team and looking at the app together. Doing this enables better communication between designers and engineers, helping both understand each other's constraints and decision-making processes.
It comes down to the art of compromise
In the end, any approach to resolving design debt will require compromise. The best products are made on balanced teams who trust each other enough to have healthy conflict from the viewpoints they represent.
What strategies have you used to addressed outstanding, ongoing UX issues?
