Emma Chittenden gave a presentation on institutionalization and UX debt. She discussed how UX has become popular in organizations but is often misused, resulting in long-term UX debt. UX debt occurs when design decisions are made at the expense of users. Examples like failed government IT projects and poorly designed loyalty programs demonstrate how UX debt can seriously impact companies. However, small changes like checklists have been shown to significantly reduce risks and improve outcomes. Addressing UX debt requires understanding users and prioritizing their needs over short-term gains.

1. Hi, I’m Emma from Nomensa.
This is my presentation ‘Institutionalisation and UX debt’
from Interact London 2014.
UX has become seen as the key to solving complex
problems and increasing revenue for organisations.
However, most organisations still use it because it's
fashionable and don’t always understand when and
where to use it – often resulting in long-term UX debt. I
will be talking about how understanding what UX debt is
at an institutional level can reduce cost and risk.
INSTITUTIONALISATION
AND UX DEBT
Emma Chittenden

2. If you build it, they will come.
Emma Chittenden

3. Emma Chittenden
Yet if you build it inappropriately, no matter how beautiful
it is, they will probably stay away.

4. Emma Chittenden
JESSE JAMES
GARRETT
So in this, the age of technology, information and data, we
have found a solution - User Experience

5. Emma Chittenden
User experience has become so popular, everyone is doing it.
Designers have suddenly become UX designers and the skills appear
everywhere.

6. There is nothing new with this, 10 years ago, IT
support went through the same kind of revolution.
Emma Chittenden

7. Businesses went from seeing it as a necessary evil to
identifying it as essential to their business as the utilities
that serviced their buildings. It became the thing many
built.
Emma Chittenden

8. Emma Chittenden
UX is something a little less tangible, yet businesses are
seeing how important it is to their survival in a digital age.

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It means businesses have the opportunity to go back to the old days, when the
shop owner knew customers by name. A relationship was established and
customers were treated accordingly.

10. Business leaders hear about UX or hear the results that it can
“WE N E E D
T O D O U X ! ”
deliver and this is what they say.
Emma Chittenden

11. Emma Chittenden
The concept of UX becomes as fashionable as buying the latest
must have gadget and it is seen as the saviour to a lot of
problems.

12. In fact, this is where the businesses start to create a lot of their
problems.
Emma Chittenden

13. Emma Chittenden

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They held a lot of government IT contracts. One in particular was a
private finance initiative called Pathway.

15. Pathway was intended as a solution to replace department of work
and pensions benefit cheques with a card that would give claimants
access to their money via the Post Office.
Emma Chittenden

16. It was a massive project, it consumed resources like a coal fired power
station. Yet do we see the effect pathway had today?
Emma Chittenden

17. No. It was yet another costly IT infrastructure project that failed to see
the light of day.
Emma Chittenden

18. Emma Chittenden
But why did it fail? The problem to the government was the cost. But
what about the problems the users faced? This is where the UX debt
started

19. It took another 10 years for the debt to be repaid, with the help of
banks and the introduction of non-status bank accounts.
Emma Chittenden

20. SO WHAT EXACTLY
IS UX DEBT?
Emma Chittenden
Why should it matter?

21. The current thinking is leveraged from technical debt. Your design
decisions are being made at the expense of the user.
The fai lure to understand what problem
you are trying to solve and fai l ing to
leverage your users to solve i t .
Emma Chittenden

22. Or put more simply, everything gets pushed to the mythical ‘phase 2’.
So let’s take a look at a couple of UX debt examples
Emma Chittenden

23. Emma Chittenden
Morrison’s are never very far from the press in the supermarket wars.
Only recently they started offering online shopping.

24. But in an age when all their major competitors
have been offering online shopping for around a
decade - is it too late for them?
Emma Chittenden

25. Faced with low budget supermarkets eating into
their revenue, they have launched a loyalty card
to help them try and compete. Sadly it’s ended in
public embarrassment. Had they taken the time
to talk to their customers a lot of this could have
been avoided.
Emma Chittenden

26. Like financial debt however, UX debt of this kind
can end up resulting in a very serious problem.
The kind that could cause a company to fail.
Emma Chittenden

27. Emma Chittenden
UX debt is always going to be there at some level throughout an organisation.
Even the best don’t always get it right. When Apple launched iOS7, all anyone
complained about where some of the little details weren’t quite perfect.

28. Emma Chittenden
The fact that Apple had completely redesigned an operating system UI in around 12
months was overlooked. However, Apple are able to launch a product onto the market
that’s 95% there.
When their competitors try it however, they aren’t so lucky.

30. A USER INTERFACE IS
LIKE A JOKE. IF YOU
HAVE TO EXPLAIN IT,
I T ’ S NO T T H A T G O O D .
Emma Chittenden
Of course, this inevitably what
happens.

31. Emma Chittenden
The missing ingredient was of course re-added in an update.
this was a little bit more embarrassing than what Apple
faced. It hasn’t caused the company to fail, but it has put a
dent in their reputation.

32. Emma Chittenden
So when they announced Windows 10 last week… they had
to swallow their pride and put it back. They’re repaying the
UX debt.

33. Emma Chittenden
So we’ve seen what happens when you make design decisions that impact on the experience of a product.
These happen every day and nobody real thinks much of them, until something bad happens .

34. So I’ve talked a bit about what UX debt is, but how can we
repay it, or better yet, avoid it?
HOW DO WE AVOID
IT?
Emma Chittenden

35. 1% 100%
Emma Chittenden
We, at Nomensa work with the concept of UX maturity. We have come to understand
that those businesses that lack a degree of UX maturity will often create a problem
they need to solve.

36. The problem may have its roots in pleasing shareholders by
increasing revenue for the business.
Emma Chittenden

37. The problem may be about copying a competitor.
Emma Chittenden

38. …or it may be about wanting their company to be like their
competitors.
Emma Chittenden

39. For the most part, they will lack the maturity to listen to their
customers. To get to the root of what the actual problem is, and
how they can solve it.
Emma Chittenden

40. Emma Chittenden
After all, listening to customers could identify flaws in
infrastructure that could be costly to change, what happens if
it fails? I’d like to counter that, what happens if it doesn’t
fail…

41. Emma Chittenden
What happens if it succeeds?

42. Emma Chittenden
Of course, changing infrastructure or even
culture in a business is costly and filled with
challenges, but there are ways to make it
work.
Virgin recently hosted a Google hangout with
Tim Brown from IDEO & Eric Reis, the author
of the lean startup.

43. Emma Chittenden
ERIC REIS
In it, Reis said ‘I think that if you look that the way modern companies need to be
built, we need a new blueprint to what a business needs to look like.’ All businesses
follow the same structure even modern tech companies

44. Emma Chittenden
“ L E T ’ S D O
A G I L E ” ,
O R…
“ L E T ’ S D O
U X . ”
I mean we’ve all seen this right, the guy at
the top telling us we need to do something.

45. WHY HOLD ON TO
Emma Chittenden
THE PAST?
So why are we clinging on so rigidly to the old ways
of doing things, just because millions have done it
before, doesn’t mean it’s the right way.

46. MARKETING
SALES DIGITAL
Emma Chittenden
Let’s embrace a new way of thinking. Let’s
stop seeing teams or business units as
silo’s where they are responsible for their
OPS
own area.
HR I .T.

47. Let’s think about the people that generate money for us, the end user.
Investigating their needs, understanding their problems.
Emma Chittenden

48. PROFIT LOYALTY
Emma Chittenden
HAPPY
MONEY
Happy customers mean loyal customers. Loyal customers mean
spending customers. Spending customers mean better profits and
better profits mean happy shareholders. Switching the traditional focus
from ‘what should we do to make the shareholders happy’ will ironically,
make them happy.

49. What I’m talking about requires change, to many seems big and scary.
We work with the concept of micro and macro, but I’ll let my colleague
HOW DO WE
PAY BACK
THE DEBT?
Simon describe those in more detail later.
Emma Chittenden

50. Emma Chittenden
Instead, I want to look how a small change can make a big difference.

51. A surgeon and professor from Harvard, Atul Gawande was approached
by the World Health Organisation and asked if he could help cut the
mortality rates attributed to surgery.
ATUL
GWANDE
Emma Chittenden

52. Emma Chittenden
He quickly realised that they couldn’t solve the problem using traditional
methods, so he looked how high risk industries reduce risk, like sky scraper
builders & aviation industry.

53. He found the one thing that they had in common, was check lists.
Emma Chittenden

54. Emma Chittenden
This is the end result - a single piece of paper.

55. LONDON, UK IFAKARA, TANZANIA
Emma Chittenden
They introduced this document at nine hospitals globally, the USA, Canada, the UK, Africa, India, UAE,
Philippines and New Zealand. After these hospitals adopted it, the complication rate fell by 35%. The
death rates fell by 47%.

56. Emma Chittenden
Let’s just take a moment to consider that. This piece of paper
resulted in 47% less deaths either during or following a surgical
procedure at the hospitals where it was trialed.

57. Emma Chittenden
I think Atul Gawande sums it up very well, and in a way that we
can all appreciate as UX practitioners, ‘As individual as we want to
be, complexity requires group success’

58. “ L i f e mo v e s p r e t t y f a s t , i f y o u d o n ’ t s t o p a n d
look around once in a whi le, you might miss
Emma Chittenden
i t…”
Finally, I just want to add a thought from the late, great John
Hughes (by way of Ferris Beuller), a mantra we can all appreciate,
in stopping to look around, we can see that small changes can
make a big difference.

59. THANK YOU
Emma Chittenden