Fixing Your UX Debt

In The 3-Step Guide to Erasing Your UX Debt, Jack Moffett shares:

Step 1: Create and Validate a UX Debt Inventory. Review your support call logs, analytics data, customer surveys and interview results and make a list of your top UX issues.

Step 2: Prioritization. Rank your issue issues by severity. This could be a usability severity rating based on task completion or time on task or customer satisfaction score or based on the number of support calls or lost revenue due to the issues. Or a scorecard based on all of these factors and/or others. Whatever I most important to your organization.

You can create a matrix of severity of issues over estimated time to fix to determine the order that issues get fixed.

You can also use a UX Debt Calculator.

Step 3: Schedule. Your debt doesn’t get paid off until you fix it. You need to have the discipline to build “debt payment” into your development schedule. This will require that the decision makers in your organization understand the cost of the debt and a clearly articulated plan to address it.

Jack Moffett shares this advice:

“UX debt should be understood as the responsibility of the entire organization—not just the UX group. It takes a good working relationship with your entire team to ensure that UX debt is given the attention it deserves. And of course, the best way to eliminate UX debt is always avoiding it in the first place.”

Please payoff your debts.