Can you delay investing in UX until your product or website is operational? In this article, we talk about the importance of User Experience design as a part of the build process—and how you can avoid expensive UX debt and all its complications.
We all appreciate good UX. But when we’re deeply invested in building a new product or digital experience, it’s easy to forget the importance of User Experience design. It’s not a “nice to have”; it’s an integral part of any successful product. The reason why is simple:
If a product or experience is hard to use, it will be hard to sell, support, and maintain.
So, let’s talk about the importance of UX from the very start of the development process. Critical to this issue is the concept of UX debt.
What Is UX Debt?
A good user experience is not something that can be layered on top of a finished product. This mentality overlooks the fact that UX is not just about user engagement; it’s about how the product works. If you add it too late in the process, you’ll be looking at expensive fixes and workarounds down the line. And the longer you ignore the underlying problem, the more these issues add up. Eventually, you’ll be facing two bleak outcomes: a loss of user trust because your product doesn’t work, or an expensive reworking. Or likely both. Sure, you could try to get around it by writing reams of documentation, producing how-to videos, or creating increasingly intricate onboarding and troubleshooting processes. But at the end of the day, there’s still going to be a reckoning.
This tendency to let small UX issues snowball into major friction points is called UX debt. And like financial debt,it gets worse the longer you wait to deal with it. So while you can add UX to your company too early, there’s no such thing as tackling UX issues too soon.
What About Decision Debt?
While this article is going to focus on the most expensive areas of UX debt–technical and support–it’s also important to mention decision debt. If you don’t recognize the importance of user experience design, it’s very easy to let these decisions slide. But this isn’t a case of form or function; in a digital experience, form is function. So if you delay UX too long, you’ll have a backlog of decisions to be made. The longer you wait to make the decisions, the more you’ll fall behind your competition. Why? Because while you’re struggling to address last year’s decision, they’re planning next year’s advances.
The Importance of User Experience vs. Technical Debt
First of all, let’s acknowledge that technical debt happens to everyone because technology moves quickly. However, ignoring the user experience can worsen technical debt. This often leads to a mountain of support tickets or employees (specifically, devs) spending too much time finding workarounds for poorly designed processes. Fixing one problem can cascade into multiple issues in other parts of the process, which show up as user experience issues. It doesn’t take long for unnecessary effort to turn into frustration and poor customer satisfaction. On the employee end, workers are hampered by systems that are complicated and labor-intensive where they could be simple and straightforward.
If you ignore this kind of debt for too long, soon workarounds and patches won’t be enough; you’ll be looking at a major redesign and redeployment. On the other hand, ensuring the user experience works for employees and customers eliminates many problems before they arise—and leaves you with more time to focus on growth rather than first aid.
Delayed UX and Support Debt
Ignoring UX almost inevitably leads to poor design. Poor design doesn’t consider how, when, and why users will use a product, or the challenges they might face while using it. This means more support requirements when the product goes live
Yes, support teams are there to answer customer questions. However, imagine what it’s like to answer the same questions over and over, for most of your day…every day…every month… How long do you think support agents are going to stay with a company that lets these problems snowball when starting good UX design would have obviated them?
Delayed UX doesn’t just cause more support tickets; it contributes to higher support costs and higher overhead. And the repetitive nature of this work can make good-quality support agents leave. Now you have a high support load, high turnover, lower productivity, and high burnout. That’s a debt we all want to avoid, right?
So what’s the solution? What can you do if you have identified areas of UX debt leading to all these other types of debt?
Addressing User Experience Debt with UX Auditing
Sticking with the illustration of financial debt, what’s the first step towards recovery? “Stopping the bleeding” is the standard reply, but you can’t do that until you understand where the hemorrhage is. For this, we use auditing, and in UX debt, we have UX auditing.
UX auditing involves mapping the breakdowns in your system—the points where neglecting UX has created bottlenecks and frustration. UX auditing isn’t a complete fix, but it will show you where to apply fixes. You can prioritize these fixes based on criticality, complexity, and impact. We recommend prioritizing high-impact, low-effort fixes and user-critical fixes to get some immediate relief. You can learn more about how to prioritize changes here.
As you move forward, remember to address the root cause of UX debt: the mindset that led you to neglect the importance of the user experience. Make sure you learn your lesson: align changes with user needs, track and analyze problems, and be proactive about preventing that debt from getting too big. Your users, employees, and budget will thank you.
