Defining terms
Experience: what someone ultimately sees feels has to do
Debt: something you at given / allowed to do that you will have to pay back at a later date.
What we mean when we say experience debt:
When there are small frictions that you leave in place in service to a bigger more immediate goal.
The ways debt can come due:
When you want to fix it or make other changes, and now it costs you a lot more to update
A small seeming change you determined was not a big friction but over time or taken in sum with other small frictions amounts to a much bigger problem to the end user. Or it dilutes a bigger experience principle you wanted to instill in the experience
Decisions and trade offs you make in one moment, but as a team don’t remember when you make updates, until either too late and your changes cause more issues or requires a lot of added effort to re-determine (or is this a stretch?)
How you manage debt
This is not about debt 0 - not all debt is bad. It’s about it being a conscious weighing of options.
This is also about how you think about reporting - are there moments where you made a choice to go with something slightly more arduous or against brand principle? Then have you accounted for what metric or signal you want to keep track of to determine at what threshold you revisit? Or even just noting this is a moment in the journey where trade offs are happening, and have that heat map ready so that IF some metric spikes the wrong way, you have an immediate flag to remind you this may be a contributing factor.
