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Design debt is often a hidden killer of consistency. Here’s how to resolve it.
Paying off Design debt in small chunks helps to improve overall design consistency
Have you ever found yourself on a project where inconsistency is a thorn in your side?
Whether it’s being part of a re-design with incredibly tight project constraints, or knowing that the necessary large-scale changes for consistency are going to be nearly impossible to implement, sometimes projects seem to have a piecemeal approach towards consistency.
However, the root cause of this might be something that you might not have realized: your organization might have too much design debt. Design debt is one thing that’s rarely talked about, but too much of it can kill efficiency and creative freedom. Even worse, it can often seem impossible to handle Design debt alone.
Just like any other debt, though, there are steps you can take to chip away at your organization’s UX Debt slowly. But to do that, we first need to define design debt.
Design debt happens when you take shortcuts.
The simple explanation of design debt is that it’s the leftover work that occurs when you take shortcuts. To explain this, let’s examine an environment that usually breeds Design debt: the ‘fail-fast’ environment.
I’ve been on teams that have insisted on squeezing user testing, analysis, re-design, and then design-developer hand-off into a single two-week sprint. The idea was to consistently have an iterated design available to the public at the end of each sprint.
However, these tight timelines and project constraints usually create a massive amount of Design (and technical) Debt. When you’re that crunched for time, one of the first things to disappear is documentation, which means you’re often relying on your developers to interpret your design without issues. However, that’s not the only thing that can happen: user testing, brand consistency, and product vision can also fall by the wayside.
Skipping these things in favor of fast and ‘iterative’ solutions can have some adverse long-term effects. First and foremost, Design debt sours users on your brand…
