What the hell is Design Debt?? 🤔

Let's say you're creating a new Google with all its bells and whistles. You're given 1 month to build everything.

To meet the timeline, you're rushing through the design and development stage. Modal not looking good? No problem, i'll fix it later. Search results not aligned properly? No problem, i'll fix it later. No error messages when users fail to meet password requirements? No problem, only a small portion of users will face the issue anyway, i'll fix it later.

Over time, these design decisions that you have skipped on will eventually lead to decrease in user retention, increased bounce rate, decreased brand awareness, etc.

That's what design debt is, you've decided to skip on properly designing/developing your product or service, and as a result, you're now in debt because these issues will eventually pop up in the future.

Think of it as Opportunity Cost in Economics, you can either go to college today or skip all classes. If you skip, you get more rest, and so the cost of you skipping is you not going to college at all and increasing your chances of scoring a bad grade.

Hey @RickN, @muchkler gave a good description of design debt. Here are my two cents on the 2nd part of your question "How to deal with it".

As a product manager, I and my team have built our share of UX and tech debt when rushing to ship products. However, once we ship the products, and are in measurement and iteration mode, we then allocate 10-20% of our capacity towards UX Debt. We create a UX Debt backlog and begin pulling 1 or 2 items from it each sprint and resolve it end to end.

This is similar to tech debt, where we allocate some percentage of our sprint or capacity towards tech debt resolution.

We have found this is a good balance as it helps remove UX debt and keeps stakeholders happy in terms of balancing net new work with debt clean up. Hope that helped.

Mirvise