Five steps for tackling design debt

Working in a fast-paced agile environment with a focus on quick iterations and MVP milestones, teams inevitably accumulate design debt. Find out what it is, why it exists and how to deal with it.

What is design debt?

A lesser-known cousin of the technical debt, this term refers to all the product design imperfection that accumulate over time. It can take many forms and cover both the product and the process:

• Product: inconsistent appearance or functionality that negatively impact learnability and credibility of the interface. This can be split further into information architecture, UI, copy, interactions etc, see NN/g article for a more in-depth take on this.
• Process: outdated, incomplete or non-existent design system, messy or flat design files, inconsistent implementation and weak workflows that hinder the design process.

It also includes research debt which can affect both the product (poor user experience) and the process (lack of data to base design decisions on). More on this later.

Why does it exist?

Design debt is a natural by-product of growth and innovation. It accumulates over time, as teams cut corners to reach short-term goals or as new research insights become available. It’s also a sign of a lack of design refactoring — a systematic process of improving design without add new functionality.

Is design debt bad?

Design debt isn’t inherently good or bad. If your team creates and iterates at pace, you expect a small amount of design debt lingering around and functioning like an ongoing to-do list.

But when it accumulates, design debt can cause a lot of frustrations for both your team (process) and your users (product). It also tends to have a snowball effect — working around errors and inconsistencies creates more errors and inconsistencies and their growth is often exponential.

How to address design debt?

Hopefully, by now you get a good idea why tackling design debt should be a priority for your team. You don’t need to wait until things get unmanageable — the more regularly you perform these routine steps, the less likely you’re to see design debt growing…