UX Debt: The Silent Killer of Product Momentum

In the rush to get new features out the door, it can be tempting to put off what seem like small user experience (UX) concerns for later.

Maybe you added a bunch of new screens to support a workflow when the whole thing could have been integrated with an existing workflow, saving users time and effort.

Maybe you’ve decided that clunky form is “good enough for now” because you just need to start collecting data and responses.

Maybe you threw some new items into another level of navigation and you’ve convinced yourself it “shouldn’t be too confusing” for users.

Each of these decisions can seem small and harmless on their own, but little trade-offs can compound into something much bigger and more costly over time.

Much like technical debt, UX debt is the accumulation of small design compromises that can create massive friction for users and complexity for product teams.

UX debt slows product momentum, reduces your ROI, and makes it harder to innovate. And unlike a visible bug or feature gap, UX debt is often invisible until it starts causing real damage.

Let’s unpack how UX debt can creep into your product, why it matters more than you think, and how you can modify your processes to track, resolve, and prevent UX debt and keep your product healthy, scalable, and successful.

The Snowball Effect of “Just One More Screen…”

One of the most common phrases in product development is “just one more screen.” To business leaders or those on the periphery of your product, it can seem like new features or enhancements should be as easy as that.

In reality, we all know that every time you add something to your product, you’re potentially making it more complex for your users and your team. Every addition has an impact, no matter how small it may seem at the time.

That new screen needs to fit into the information architecture. You need to build intuitive user flows that lead into and out of it. It also needs to align with the particular look, feel and interactions established in your design system. It could have unanticipated impacts on user onboarding, empty states, error handling, analytics, or even behind-the-scenes business and data logic.

If you’re thinking about a screen in a vacuum and not considering these consequences up front, your product can quickly become harder to use and maintain. Your team needs to think holistically and not get put into a position of duct-taping pieces together.

After all, you’re here to build a cohesive scalable system, not fragmented experiences that frustrate and confuse your users and burden your teams with extra re-work down the line.

UX Debt Compounds Like Interest

The real danger of UX debt is how small individual compromises multiply over time.

Let’s say your product team has delivered a dozen or more new features over the past year and each one was rushed to meet a deadline. Maybe you skipped user testing. Maybe your original designer left and the new design has a different flavor. Maybe the new flow works, but there are a few buttons or other details out of place that make users work just a little harder to find them.

None of these things are going to break your product tomorrow. But as they stack up and build on each other, they’re creating a mess that's getting more difficult to clean up.

Here are just a few examples of relatively small product decisions that can compound quickly into real UX debt.

• Settling for inconsistent interactions. Users get comfortable with how your product responds to their actions. It’s how they relate to your brand and your product or service. When you throw little nuances into things like how a “Submit’ button looks and behaves or where a drag-and-drop function is available or not, you force users to relearn subtle behaviors that can have a big impact on their overall perception of your company.

• Slowly introducing conflicting patterns. Nothing creates confusion and frustration more for users than when something that should be smooth and easy turns out to be complex and time-consuming. Conflicting patterns can range from innocent mistakes, like mixing navigation menus, to more sinister intentional things, like “dark” patterns that manipulate users into doing the exact opposite of what they were trying to do. Either way, they can dilute the overall user experience and trust users are willing to place in you.

• Creating redundant paths. Sometimes it’s helpful to give users multiple paths to achieve the same goal. When done strategically, it can increase discoverability in your product. But when redundant paths are created as a result of haphazard product updates, they can quickly create dead ends or confusing choices that compete for user attention and ruin their understanding of where they are in the flow.

• Over-relying on band-aid solutions. Everybody needs a band-aid once in a while. It helps stop the bleeding and protect from further injury. But band-aids are not a long-term strategy. If you find yourself (and your product) repeatedly getting injured in the same ways, then you probably need to stop and ask yourself what is causing the problems in the first place. Band-aids just mask deeper problems rather than solve them.

If you don’t watch out for these “small” interactions, you’ll wake up one day and realize the UX of your product has become so bloated that even “simple” feature updates require a huge effort to untangle all the dependencies and broken connections.

Don’t burn time fixing instead of innovating. Keep your product and your team agile and you’ll prevent user churn, reduce support tickets, enjoy more manageable dev cycles, and take advantage of opportunities to make your product the best it can be.

Why Most “Design Shops” Miss the Bigger Picture

Many design firms aren’t in a position to think holistically about how changes or additions to your product will impact the bigger picture. They churn out features and screens that meet general UX standards and solve your surface-level needs for an interface that looks and feels good.

But those kinds of design teams aren’t thinking more deeply about the impact they’re having on the rest of your product.

They’re not asking the questions that we ask every time we start to work with a client on a project:

• How will this new feature, screen, or user flow fit into your existing workflows?

• Does this design duplicate functionality that already exists elsewhere in the product?

• Is this consistent with your current (or future) design system?

• How might we simplify and eliminate some elements, screens, features or designs instead of just stacking on more?

Our Drawbackwards design thinking approach is to take a step back before we even think about designing and ask why users need this, how they’ll use it, and what else it will impact in your product and business.

Our team of product managers, researchers, designers, and developers is built to provide an end-to-end view across the entire product experience, not just to churn out individual buttons, features, and screens.

Sometimes we might recommend revisiting an existing flow instead of answering your stated need to layer a new experience on top of what you already have. Or, we might start to help you identify the UX debt that’s getting in the way of users experiencing the full value of your product.

We’re not afraid to challenge assumptions when needed or advocate for long-term value over short-term solutions. That’s how we dissolve complexity to produce world-class user experiences with meaningful ROI.

At the end of the day, our goal is the same as yours: to make your product easier to use, easier to maintain, and easier to grow.

When You Think of UX as an Investment, It Becomes a Multiplier

Have you ever had to re-design a feature because users were confused by it? Have you heard your sales team complain that prospects keep saying the product is too complex? Then you’ve felt the real pain of UX debt.

The good news is that you can start paying down your UX debt and prevent it from bankrupting your product. It just takes a strategic investment.

That doesn’t mean you have to slow down or stop introducing new features and designs.

It means you need to work smarter. You need to embed UX thinking into every stage of your development cycle, from product strategy to implementation.

When you think of UX as an investment, you set yourself up to experience long-term returns on that investment. Rather than thinking of how much this is going to cost, plan out how much it’s going to return in user satisfaction and how much time and effort it’s going to save down the line.

Here are a few of the benefits you get from investing in UX rather than thinking of it as a cost:

• Faster development cycles. When your UX strategy is clear and well-scoped, you’re able to more clearly define the features and designs that will deliver on that strategy. This leads to less churn in your own development cycles and helps you build better features faster.

• Lower support costs. One of the unseen costs of bad UX is the number of help tickets and customer support calls it can generate. Poorly-designed features, confusing interactions, and broken flows generate confusion and frustration. When users can help themselves through an intuitive product experience, they have less reasons to reach out to you for help.

• Greater user retention. Nobody wants to use a convoluted and difficult product. You might get away with bad UX when people are forced to use your product, but you’ll degrade your own brand and reputation in the process. In a competitive market, somebody will replace you with a better experience. In order to keep users, you have to deliver value with less friction.

• Stronger product-market fit. One of the most overlooked aspects of good UX is user research. You think you know your users well enough to anticipate their needs, or you think that they’ll get used to the product once they see all that it can do for them. We’ve seen time and again how great ideas die on the vine because they haven’t found the right product-market fit. A strong design thinking cycle of research, ideation, testing and iteration creates multiple opportunities to keep uncovering unmet needs. This ensures your product is not just useful for people today, but will continue to be useful well into the future.

• Greater team alignment. When you build UX into your development cycle, it centers each decision around what is good for your users. This has the great side effect of giving everybody on your team, from product strategists and managers to designers and developers, a common understanding of the value your product brings to people. When you’re all focused on the same goals, you can make decisions individually and together that contribute to making that experience even better.

These are just some of the ways that better UX pays for itself many times over. It’s not just about user satisfaction. Paying down UX debt can result in real business outcomes that can help you pay down that other kind of debt too.

How to Spot and Solve UX Debt

Now that we’ve talked about how important it is to pay down your UX debt, let’s look at some of the symptoms that can tell you if your product is suffering from it.

Here are a few red flags

• New features take longer to ship than expected. What you thought should be an easy fix has taken a sprint (or two or three) too long to deliver. That’s a sure sign that past bad decisions are getting in the way of current progress.

• Users keep making the same support requests or mistakes. If you’re looking for signs of UX debt but don’t know where to start, go to your support desk. Chances are, whoever is handling the customer service complaints and questions has a pretty accurate sense of what’s not working in your product (and why).

• Your product feels clunky or confusing even after adding new functionality. New features and functionality is supposed to solve problems, not create them. If you notice that every time you launch something new it generates a dozen smaller problems to solve, then you might have some existing UX debt from past choices that are coming back to haunt you.

• Teams struggle to agree on how things “should” work. We’ve seen this time and again when joining an internal client team as long-term partners. One hand doesn’t know (or necessarily agree with) what the other hand is doing. This is a sure sign you need to get on the same page as a team and there’s almost no better way to do that than to redirect the focus back to user needs. What will make their experience better?

• Analytics show a drop-off in key workflows. One of our first steps in working with clients is to ask for their analytics. The data doesn’t lie and sometimes it can show you exactly where you need to focus your attention first. If your users are dropping off at specific points in key workflows, you’ve probably been ignoring some key aspect of the user experience.

The first step in resolving UX debt is gaining visibility to see where it’s hurting your product the most.

Conduct audits to map out the inconsistencies in your user experience and the biggest friction points. Interview your users and do research to understand the “why” behind their actions and needs.

Most importantly, you need to align your team around the core design principles that will help you prioritize simplicity, clarity, and cohesion throughout your product.

Build Your Future Without Dragging UX Debt Behind You

The next time someone says, “It’s just one more screen,” stop and think about what that screen really means for your users, your team, and your product.

Successful products thrive on forward momentum. And nothing can kill that momentum like UX debt. It starts as a slow drag and eventually pulls so hard that you end up taking two steps back for every step forward.

Drawbackwards can help you see the forest and the trees. Our team will dig deeper than screens and features to consider your full user experience. We’ll examine how UX debt might be holding you back across all your workflows and platforms. We’ll help you build great UX into the foundation of your product, not just slap it on as a nice-to-have add-on.

Because the true cost of building a great product isn’t how much you spend on design and development. It’s what happens when you let your UX debt drag you down and hold you back.

Let’s talk about how we can help you simplify your product, remove UX debt, and get the best ROI possible out of your user experience.