Imagine heading out to sea in a ship with a tiny hole in it. You don’t realize that it’s ever-so-slightly taking on water, so it never occurs to you to radio for help or put on a life jacket. But nonetheless, the ship is going down — and by the time you figure it out, ever-so-slightly has morphed into full-blown panic.

That’s exactly what it’s like to be an enterprise that’s drowning in design debt.

We talk so much about tech debt, but design debt can be just as lethal. It’s certainly not a new concept, but we’re seeing more and more of it starting to emerge. So what is design debt? Why is it happening now? How can you spot it in your enterprise and how do you stop it?

What is design debt?

It comes in a few shapes and sizes:

• It’s all of the less exciting groundwork you pushed aside in favor of quicker, cheaper, shorter-term gains. Maybe you haven’t hired enough designers. Maybe you’ve got developers hastily patching things. Maybe you just don’t want to put significant budget towards more precise design, thinking that perfection is the enemy of good.
• It’s the time you wasted building a product that wasn’t a good fit for your market because you skipped critical research beforehand.
• It’s the limitations and bottlenecks you have to overcome on every project because you are not leveraging scalable solutions like design systems.

All of that poor planning and prioritization leads to imperfections – and just like other kinds of debt, design debt compounds over time. Users leave, customer satisfaction scores drop, net promoter scores drop, and your competitors take a larger share of the market. If you’re the average enterprise suffering from design debt, every $10 that you’re losing right now could have been avoided by spending $1 before.

Why is there a surge of design debt now?

Look no further than the economy. When enterprises operate in a tough financial environment, they don’t focus on long-term design or may even cut design budgets. Executives who are under extreme pressure to grow margins and keep investors happy tend to gravitate towards quick fixes. For example, they may choose to avoid the upfront cost of new systems, but staying with an old, complex legacy system means updates and new ideas are slower to build. Another quick fix is to move as quickly as possible, especially if leadership is saying “It doesn’t need to be perfect. Just get it out.” But prioritizing speed over thoroughness is a surefire way for inefficiencies to be overlooked or put on a backlog that never gets resolved. Yet another quick fix is to overwork design teams, which leads to corners being cut and, thus, design debt creeps up.

The designers on the team understand the problem with all of this, but in many cases, there isn’t a design leader that ranks highly enough on the org chart to bridge the gap between the boots on the ground and the C-suite. If you look at today’s economy, it’s easy to understand why a swath of enterprises are suffering from design debt. But remember, this is a ship that takes on water slowly, so most executives won’t even realize it for another year or so.

What are the symptoms of design debt?

Part of what makes design debt so destructive is that it creeps up on non-designers. Designers can spot it immediately, but many don’t have the autonomy or the resources to actually fix it. That’s why design teams should be empowered and encouraged to be more proactive.

There are a number of telltale signs, though, if you know what to look for. Even before you start to lose users or see a drop in customer satisfaction, you’ll likely see things like overworked designers constantly putting out fires, developers taking more time to complete their work, and an increase in the time it takes to get products or updates into market. You’ll also hear sales reps and customer support staff mentioning the same customer complaints over and over. You  may hear how customers are ignoring entire feature areas or developing their own workarounds. Non-designers may be able to identify UX/UI specifics that need to be fixed, but they probably can’t identify design debt as the root cause. They mistakenly think there’s one issue that needs a band aid, rather than a fundamental problem. And thus, the ship keeps taking on water.

When do the non-designers typically notice? When design debt reaches a critical mass: users are leaving, revenue is dropping, customer satisfaction scores are plummeting, the brand is losing respect, and designers are quitting their jobs because they’re burned out from not having the resources to do their jobs successfully.

Whether an immediate full-blown panic ensues, or leadership has to be shaken out of denial first, the next step typically involves throwing money at the problem — but the cost of fixing design debt can be astronomical. Possibly millions instead of thousands. And with less revenue coming in, enterprises are backed into a corner.

Now what?

In its early stages, design debt can be fixed in a few different ways: with a design system, a DesignOps function, slower feature releases so there is more time for scalability, better research, or simply giving design leadership more visibility and strategic power. But when it spirals out of control, we’re talking end-to-end rebuilds and huge staffing and hiring challenges.

That’s where Launch comes in. Some enterprises come to us for design debt triage, but more commonly they hire us to solve a problem they couldn’t solve because their design debt has spiraled out of control. We’re often asked to build something impactful & innovative, something that will compensate for the less-than-optimal design that’s been in market. And while addressing the immediate problem is critical, so is preventing this new solution from falling into the same design debt traps.

That’s why we focus on getting to the root cause of client challenges. In cases of extreme design debt, the enterprise usually doesn’t have a good design foundation. There’s no design leader (at least, not above a manager level), no process for effective prioritization, no DesignOps, and no cross-functional communication loop. We give clients a modern and scalable framework for design, helping them break free from legacy tools and outdated processes. We lead them through the design-thinking process and model how design should collaborate with product & engineering. We show them how to incorporate DesignOps and develop effective design systems.

For clients with less extreme design debt, we help mature the entire organization’s view of design. That means encouraging engineers to act as champions for design debt because it goes so hand-in-hand with tech debt. Or helping their leadership align design initiatives to business value, so there is a more effective loop for designers to push back against unreasonable deadlines or inadequate research. Or even building bespoke design tools to open entirely new design options in new technology spaces.

Most importantly, though, we root all of our work and change management in business value. That way, everyone — designer or not — understands the danger of design debt and has the same North Star to measure design success.

If you’re suffering from design debt, or fear you could be, you can’t afford to wait. Connect with our team to start working on remediation and transformation.