Presenter Profile: Alicja is a Product Designer, Illustrator & Animator, Founder of Outdraw Design. The experience working with companies like Sourcegraph, Adobe Workfront, and Toggl inspired her to create Design Debt 101 – a knowledge base about Design Debt. Her goal is to popularise knowledge about this topic to help Design Teams manage their Design Debt and, ultimately, use it to their advantage when building the product.
Presentation Title: Design Debt 101
Outline: Design debt is the sum of all the imperfections of the user experience and design processes that appear over time due to innovation, growth, and lack of design refactoring. Accumulating Design Debt over time is natural and happens to every product. The key is to recognise, understand, and manage it properly. During this talk, I will break down the Design Debt definition, its types (UX, visual and operational), its causes, and its consequences. I will speak about my experiences with measuring and paying off the Design Debt. This knowledge will help you and your Team reduce friction in design processes, increase productivity and speed up innovation.
Workshop
Title: ‘Design Debt: Manage & Use Strategically’
Goal: Transform participants’ relationship with Design Debt from negatively impacting the growth of their products to using it strategically to their advantage. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the Design Debt, and prepare to set up an actionable plan that their teams can start acting on immediately.
Participants will learn how to:
1. Identify and manage Design Debt
Understanding Design Debt is key to growing their product sustainably and taking calculated risks.
2. Get buy-in from stakeholders
We teach how to communicate thier message about Design Debt to various departments and decision-makers.
3. Align their efforts to achieve the goal
Team needs to be on the same page to execute the strategy across all the disciplines seamlessly.
4. Change their organisation’s culture
Managing Design Debt requires a global change in the approach to innovating and design processes.
5. Use Design Debt strategically
Leveraging Design Debt can speed up innovation and lead to the exponential growth of your company.
6. Create processes related to the Design Debt
Establishing good processes will help you gain long-term control over your Design Debt and keep it on the desired level.