Iz članka:
If a product has become fragmented with inconsistent UI, poor information architecture, unclear copy and fractured UX, we know that it’s plagued with ‘design debt’.
In this story, I’ve highlighted the 5 common reasons why products have design debt:
- Teams design for features — without understanding how a feature would impact the end-to-end customer journey
- Teams don’t focus on user problems, they jump from insight straight to solution
- Lack of collaboration within squads — everyone is running their own show
- Designers don’t involve engineers early in the design process. This leads to missed edge cases, feasibility issues that could’ve been caught early on. Pushed for time, engineers have to improvise and compromise on quality
- It is a big challenge for distributed designers to align on their work, unless there’s an intentional effort through a design system or a central design team. Sometimes, design/dev skills gap also lead to design debt in product.
In addition to creating awareness, we’ve taken many actions to tackle these challenges:
- We built a design system that brings cohesion and consistency to the product. We continue to invest in this initiative by scaling the team and growing our library of reusable components, helpful design guidelines and much more
- We’re building a central design team to bridge the design competency gaps, such as visual design, motion, illustration and system design
- We’ve established several avenues for our designers to share their work for greater visibility and alignment including a well-structured design critique, jamming sessions and a monthly design showcase
- We’ve killed our design had-off as a single event in time. Our designers now evolve their hi-fi prototypes with their engineers — not in a silo