Value and outcomes
Design debt
Also calledUX debt
The accumulated cost of shortcuts and inconsistencies in a product's design, which makes every future change slower and the experience worse.
Like technical debt, design debt builds up when teams ship quick fixes, one-off components and inconsistent patterns. Each one is small; together they make the product harder to use and harder to change.
Paying it down usually means consolidating patterns into a design system, cleaning up flows and fixing the long tail of small issues found in design QA.