Title: How to Effectively Address the Usability Debt Within Your Product
Context: Never put off until tomorrow any usability debt you can clear off your backlog today.
Synopsis: There are lies, damn lies, and the promise we make to ourselves about eventually going back and fixing the usability issues in current product features rather than spending all our time introducing new ones. We say the word “iteration” and wink at each other knowing full well that we will never have—and certainly not make—time to actually go back and actually implement the gospel of Agile feature improvements. We all know that what’s currently there isn’t good enough, yet we plow ahead, cramming more workflows, and widgets, and UI into our product because that’s where the money lies. At least that’s what we’ve been told. Fixing a current feature for a current user yields no new revenue. We’ve already got that guy. But put this new (half-baked) feature in and new (half-imaginary) customers with fists-full of money will beat a path to our door. Convincing stakeholders that revenue lost by customers walking away from a consistently unpolished experience is as equal in the eyes of the bottom line as new feature revenue is a more forceful argument than the usual one we trot out about the basic need for building “better user experiences” a priori. After all, everyone speaks the language of money, while UX remains a foreign tongue to many.
Best Bit: “One key thing to remember when prioritizing usability improvements is that you want to bring visible value to your users, not just make a lot of one-off fixes.”
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