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Managing UX Debt

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Management

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UX debt is an accumulation of design and development decisions that negatively impact the users of a product. Why? Agile teams are particularly prone to UX debt as a result of heightened pressure to regularly ship new features and functionality. Continually prioritizing fast and easy solutions may help us hit release dates in the short term, but over time, repeatedly choosing shortcuts will leave us with mounting experience issues that adversely impact our users. Excerpt from my “Guide to UX Debt”

At Officevibe, Product Managers used ProductBoard to understand customer needs, prioritize upcoming features, and align everyone around the product roadmap.

One of the most significant impacts I had on the UX team was initiating the tracking of UX debt alongside potential product features. By identifying, preparing design files, and prioritizing UX debt, designers could actively influence their swimlane’s roadmap.

A view of a product UX debt backlog

I wrote a comprehensive guide to UX debt for the design team, recorded tutorial videos on how to prioritize UX debt in ProductBoard, and provided each product team with a dedicated backlog.

The prioritization formula we used was similar to the one employed by the Product team, with the addition of a driver for “Design Vision Compliance.” This metric measured violations of our Design Principles or Design System. This ensured that even minor visual bugs were addressed and could be easily inserted into a sprint.

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What will improve the product experience the most, a new feature or making an existing feature usable? Quite often, the latter choice is best, since a feature that people can’t use might as well not exist. Thus, fixing something that doesn’t work for users has the same effect as adding a new feature, in terms of what customers actually get to use. Therefore, UX problems with existing features could and should often get assigned higher priority than new features. Moreover, features are usually implemented in order of expected benefit, so that an old feature is likely to be intrinsically more valuable than a new feature, if only the old feature could be made to work for users. Excerpt from my “Guide to UX Debt”

The backlog became a valuable tool for tracking the UX team’s impact within the product.

Every quarter, I reported on the top UX debt items, what had been released, and the speed at which we were resolving issues.

Quarterly UX team report

Open debt tickets became a key part of our rituals. During our weekly design work sessions, we often selected one or two tickets and fixed them together.