UX Debt: The roommate who never does the dishes
It piles up, smells bad, and everyone’s annoyed. Here’s how to get your team to finally clean up and stop blaming each other.
Picture this: You’re a UX designer starting a new project. As you get to work, you quickly notice a series of experience flaws, poorly conceived solutions, and elements that simply don’t function as they should. Despite your concerns, no one seems to care. Meanwhile, the product team is focused on shipping new features, fixing production bugs, and moving forward, rarely revisiting glaring issues in the user experience. These problems often embarrass you as a designer, even though they aren’t your fault. Yet, you’re unable to address them because they’re not considered a priority. Over time, the issues accumulate, along with your frustration and concerns. Does this sound familiar?
This is called UX Debt, and it’s way more common than you might think. If you don’t deal with it, UX debt can quietly mess with your product’s success, make users unhappy, and even hurt your revenue. It’s a big deal.
But how does this actually happen? The main reasons usually come down to bad internal processes and not enough communication between team members. In a lot of cases, the real problem is that designers and developers are too disconnected, which causes issues. Things could take a turn for the worse if finger-pointing begins, with UX and non-UX teams potentially shifting the responsibility for UX debt onto each other.
Another thing that makes this gap worse and adds to UX debt is rushing. Agile teams usually focus only on delivering new features or whatever needs to get done, and everyone feels the pressure because of the sprint deadline. Because of this, designers often take shortcuts, hand in work that’s shallow or even incomplete, just to hit the schedule. They end up sacrificing the user experience just to save the deadline. Sounds stupid, right? That’s because it is.
Okay, I think you have a good picture of what UX debt is. Let’s focus on some actions to mitigate this problem in our daily routine
Design together
As I mentioned earlier, UX debt thrives in environments with poor communication. Invite developers to participate in prototyping from the very beginning—build low-fidelity prototypes together with the dev team. Their technical expertise can add valuable insights, often leading to surprising and innovative results. Moreover, this collaborative approach fosters mutual empathy, alignment, and a shared understanding of the tasks at hand.
Make UX rules and routines stick
It’s pretty common for UX rituals to get rushed or even skipped altogether. In those moments, designers need to step up and set some ground rules to keep communication clear and effective. A great way to do this is by having regular UX reviews. In these meetings, it’s important to bring up all experience-related issues, share UX research data, and talk through what changes need to happen, whether in the design or the code. This kind of teamwork helps everyone stay connected and on the same page.
Defend the system
A designer’s job isn’t just about cranking out as many nice-looking screens as possible. They’re also the guardian of the styles and patterns that make up the design system. The real power behind the look and user experience comes from keeping everything visually consistent and easy to use. Keeping the UX Library organized and sharing it clearly and thoroughly is the foundation of a smooth handoff. Focus on modularity and care about every component, especially the “atoms”, because if those basics aren’t solid, you won’t be able to scale without losing consistency.
UX debt is about the whole team
UX debt isn’t just the designer’s problem, often it piles up because of stuff they can’t control, like tight deadlines. When the whole team owns this responsibility, you can take a step back and plan together how to tackle the UX debt. Product owners need to understand that it’s important to set aside dedicated time for fixing debt, not just pushing out new features. Paying off this debt has a technical cost, of course, but the bigger price is the frustration it causes for users and stakeholders.
Document and track
Everyone’s got brilliant ideas about design, even if they have no clue what they’re talking about. One of the best ways to cut down on random suggestions is to create solid documentation for your design system. Good documentation not only explains your decisions in a clear way, but it also makes it easy to track every change, predict the effort and impact of updates, and prevent UX debt from spiraling out of control because of unnecessary tweaks. Take full advantage of Figma’s Dev Mode and pack in as much info as you can to help developers nail the details and keep things consistent.
Don’t forget about your users
Users can be super helpful when it comes to spotting issues in the experience. Sometimes, problems the whole team missed get uncovered in seconds during a user session. That’s why it’s a good idea to set aside a few hours each sprint for usability tests or user interviews. This way, you stay connected with your users, build stronger relationships, and get quality feedback to make the right tweaks.
Manage UX debt in an agile way
To tackle UX debt, you need to set aside a specific number of story points for it in some sprints or even every sprint. Thinking you can fix UX debt without effort or just during “free time” is wishful thinking. It’s also a good idea to dedicate a whole sprint each quarter solely to UX issues. Make sure to justify this time and effort by sharing feedback with stakeholders about the value that improved user experience bring.
In short, the message is: don’t let UX debt pile up! It might seem like no big deal, especially to product folks or developers, but that buildup can turn into a huge usability headache for users and a massive roadblock for scaling and making the project successful.
References:
Rodriguez, Andres et al. (2023). UX Debt in an Agile Development Process: Evidence and Characterization.
UXPin Inc. (2016). Eliminate UX Debt.
Baltes, Sebastian and Dashuber, Veronika (2024). UX Debt: Developers Borrow While Users Pay
If you’re wondering where to start with AI interactions, I recommend the AI-Powered UX: Next-Gen Product Design course on Udemy. In this course, I teach how to use AI for research, data analysis, ideation, and prototyping, transforming the way you design digital products. The course is in English but includes Portuguese subtitles.