Design Systems: A Proactive Defense Against Design Debt

In the early stages of a project, individual design decisions can seem inconsequential – like choosing the color of a button, deciding on padding for a card, or adding a quick CSS fix. However, within an enterprise-level product organization, isolated design decisions can cause workforce inefficiencies, create inconsistent user experiences that increase drop-off rates, and slow down time to market. As more flaws are introduced, these consequences compound over time, and what starts as a minor issue becomes harder and harder to manage as the project scales.

This problem – where small design issues build up over time to become a substantial burden – is known as design debt. In this post, we’ll look at design debt and its consequences and how a well-planned and maintained design system can help alleviate design debt in your organization.

What Is Design Debt?

Let’s say you own a car, and because life is busy, you’re a few months late getting your regular oil change. You know you should get those tires rotated more often, but there’s only so much time in the day, and you let them go six months longer than you should. That “check engine” light just turned on, but that’ll have to wait for another day or two – you have to get your daughter to kung-fu practice and your son to his baseball game.

For most of us, keeping up with car maintenance has to be balanced with the reality of our busy lives, and in the short term, there aren’t usually any consequences for putting off routine maintenance. But those little things like oil changes and tire rotations start to add up over time. Pretty soon, you’re not getting as many miles per gallon as you used to, your car starts making unsettling noises, and suddenly you’re broken down at the side of the road, waiting for AAA to tow you home.

This idea – that the small compromises we make on a daily basis can eventually add up to much bigger problems – is similar to how design debt works. And that’s what makes it so insidious; it creeps up on organizations as they grow, and it isn’t until there’s a major drag on efficiency that it’s noticed.

There are many sources of design debt, including:

Time Constraint Tight project timelines and rushing to meet deadlines can lead to superficial design decisions and "quick fixes" that have a negative lasting impact.
Lack of Resources Budget limitations or issues with team capacity might force compromises along the way.
Poor Communication Misalignment among team members can result in duplicative efforts and inconsistency.
Evolving Requirements Frequent project direction or scope changes can lead to inconsistent and patchworked design solutions.
Lack of Governance. The absence of clear design standards or oversight can lead to divergent practices, resulting in an inconsistent user experience.
One-Off Solutions. Implementing quick, ad-hoc fixes for specific problems without considering the broader design implications can create a disjointed user interface over time.

Why Design Debt Matters

Let’s look at an example. Imagine a developer working on a new app creates a primary green button (HEX #CDCD36) with all corners rounded at 20 pixels.

It may seem like a small task, but when you consider the various states of the button–hover, active, disabled–as well as coding, testing, and accessibility, creating a button can easily take five hours. Imagine that, thanks to a lack of governance or clear standards, different versions of that button get created over and over again a total of 10 times.

Not only do you wind up with visual inconsistencies, but you’ve duplicated your efforts and wasted resources. If each of those buttons took 5 hours, you’re now looking at 50 hours spent on essentially one button. If you assume an hourly rate of $185, that’s over $8000 to make one button!

Of course, that’s an extreme example. But even if there’s only two or three versions of each component, you’re looking at two or three times the development costs! And that doesn’t take into account the tedious and expensive cleanup process you’ll need to go through to restore cohesion and maintainability.

This is design debt at work, and it can have real consequences for your organization, including:

Lost Revenue Due to Poor User Experiences When users encounter obstacles or confusion, they may abandon their journey altogether, leading to lower retention rates and lost opportunities for engagement.
Slower Time to Market When designers and developers spend unnecessary time reinventing the wheel or fixing broken components, it is more difficult to quickly introduce new products or features to market.
Workforce Frustration As design debt accumulates, fixing issues later can require more time and effort. Product owners, designers, and developers can’t move quickly because they have to work around inconsistencies.
Impact on Brand Perception

A lack of attention to design quality or inconsistent application of brand elements can negatively impact a brand’s reputation and trustworthiness.

Fighting Design Debt with a Design System

Design debt is a natural side effect of growth. But how you respond to it – or better yet, how you proactively prepare for it – can make a huge difference in the impact on your organization. The best way to avoid the consequences we just outlined is to mitigate the issues at the source by implementing a design system early and establishing a strategy to evolve it. But what exactly is a design system?

A design system is a toolkit that empowers an organization to create consistent products more efficiently. It includes:

Design foundations Typography, color, layout and spacing, icons, and imagery
UI components Buttons, forms, cards, navigation, and other more complex reusable design patterns
Documentation Detailed annotations explaining how to use foundations, components, and patterns

Foster Made and Design Systems

Here at Foster Made, we have experience both mitigating existing design debt and creating design systems from the ground up.

Take our long-running partnership with ICSC for example. As the commercial retail real estate industry’s premier member organization, ICSC is constantly innovating and finding new ways to provide value to their members. We embrace their ideas and move quickly with them, taking a vision like an Algolia-powered member networking platform and making it a reality. But, even though there is a design system in place, when you’re trying to get a product to market quickly there will often be design compromises that need to be cleaned up later.

To ensure this design debt doesn’t accumulate, we have a designer sweep through on a quarterly basis to tie up loose ends, ensure accurate documentation, and archive anything that’s no longer being used. This long-term attention to detail ensures that we can continue to tackle big projects for ICSC while maintaining the functionality and brand identity of their site.

For organizations with years of accumulated design and tech debt, a total redesign of their website gives us a chance to start from scratch. A good example of this is our work with Atlas Meditech. Their family of products include the Neurosurgical Atlas—the field's premiere educational resource—and AtlasGPT, a GenAI-powered tool that can answer questions on neurosurgical topics with astonishing accuracy.

The current Atlas website has been in use for many years, and was showing its age. As they added new products and features, the design system got messier and it became harder to retain consistency. When they approached us about a total redesign of their site, we were excited to get the chance to set them up for success with a clean, organized, and well-documented design system. When the new site launches in November it will not only look great, it will be set up to continue looking great for years to come.

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