UX debt has to be paid back was originally published in UX Collective on Medium.

This article from 2022 feels pretty relevant for today. I often refer to the types of debt we accumulate as instructional design teams / units, mostly referring to technical debt, but I like the framing here of UX Debt that shares some of the same spirit.

Not all the debt is intentional, but right now is a great time to think about what instructional design debt might look like (leers at elearning influences promoting vibe coding for everything). I will be the first to refer to popular elearning authoring tools as industry albatrosses, but that’s not a problem we are going to vibe code our way out of.

Translating this idea of UX Debt to ID could mean the distance between the current learning experience and what it should be. Consider outdated content, inconsistent interactions, accessibility gaps, misaligned or missing assessments, or legacy modules built under old constraints that everyone just works around. That last one usually creeps up after changing your LMS or people platform.

I quite liked the approach the author presents to get started in addressing UX Debt. For instructional design, depending on your context, it might look like auditing against,

• accessibility standards,
• learner feedback,
• completion data, or
• alignment with current learning objectives (imagine that).

You can’t usually address all of the debt all at once, even in a brand new development. Even then you’re going to either inherit some debt or create new debt. That sounds scary, but it’s important to acknowledge what kind(s) of debt you’re willing to take on. Once you have an idea of what the situation is, you could plot items on a matrix to decide how you’re going to deal with them.

One thing I think is skipped a lot, and that I see all the time is in project planning for instructional design teams. Especially in the case of elearning / online learning, teams fill up on new projects. These might be F2F to online conversions, blended learning, new developments etc. Very rarely is a portion of work dedicated specifically for maintenance (or ever greening, or whatever you want to call it…debt payments). This kind of thing might be stuffed into “review cycles” but usually by the time things come back they’re in pretty rough shape. It would be similar to scheduling things like oil changes and fluid top ups for your vehicle on the same schedule as inspecting and replacing the timing belt.

If you’re in a design unit, how does your team manage UX / ID Debt?

Photo by Dylann Hendricks | 딜란 on Unsplash