Every ecommerce team has heard of technical debt—the accumulated cost of quick fixes and shortcuts in your codebase. But there’s another form of debt that’s equally damaging and far less discussed: design debt.
Design debt accumulates when user experience decisions are made reactively rather than strategically. It’s the inconsistent button styles across your site. The checkout flow that was “good enough” three years ago. The mobile experience that’s technically functional but frustrating to use.
How Design Debt Accumulates
Design debt often starts innocently. A quick promotional banner here. A new product feature there. Each change made sense in isolation, but over time, they’ve created an experience that feels fragmented.
Unlike technical debt, design debt is harder to measure. Your site still works. Pages still load. Orders still process. But customers feel the friction even if they can’t articulate it.
The Compounding Effect
Design debt and technical debt often reinforce each other. Poor design decisions get locked into code. Technical limitations prevent design improvements. Before long, you’re stuck in a cycle where neither team can move effectively.
The most expensive version of this is when you try to fix one without addressing the other. You invest in a beautiful redesign, but it’s built on the same brittle technical foundation. Or you refactor your codebase but preserve all the UX problems.
A Systems Approach
Breaking this cycle requires looking at design and technical debt as interconnected parts of the same system. The question isn’t “which should we fix first?” but “how do we address both in a way that creates lasting improvement?”
This usually means slowing down before speeding up. Auditing both types of debt. Understanding how they interact. Then making strategic investments that address root causes rather than symptoms.