DesignTech · EXP #04

UXLedger

A UX debt register combining fast issue logging with a scored, trend-tracked dashboard, so usability and accessibility issues get the same visibility as engineering bugs.

All experiments
01

Problems solved

  • Small problems with my website or app keep piling up
  • I do not know what is wrong with my website without paying an expert
02

Context

UX debt — the small usability, accessibility and content issues that pile up in a product — usually lives in scattered spreadsheets, sticky notes or Slack threads. It rarely gets prioritised against feature work because there's no shared, visible record of how much of it exists or how severe it is. UXLedger set out to give that debt the same visibility a bug tracker gives engineering debt.

03

The challenge

The product needed to make UX debt feel measurable and prioritisable — not just a list — while staying lightweight enough that logging an issue takes seconds, not a form-filling exercise. It also needed to speak to two audiences: designers logging issues day-to-day, and stakeholders who only look at the dashboard.

04

Research

Studied how engineering teams track technical debt and bugs, and adapted that model — severity, status, ownership — to the specific shape of UX issues, which don't always map cleanly onto a bug tracker's fields.

05

Insights

The key findings that shaped the direction.

01

A health score makes debt legible to non-designers

A single 0–100 score, colour-coded by severity, gives stakeholders a number to track without needing to read every logged issue.

02

Logging friction kills adoption faster than anything else

If capturing a UX issue takes longer than noticing it, it never gets logged — the entry flow had to be closer to a quick note than a bug report form.

03

Trends matter more than snapshots

A single health score answers 'how bad is it now' — a 30-day trend answers the more useful question, 'is it getting better.'

06

How decisions were made

  1. 01

    Borrow the bug-tracker mental model. Structured debt items around severity, status, category and ownership — fields designers and engineers already understand from issue trackers.

  2. 02

    Score for stakeholders, log for designers. Built a weighted 0–100 health score as the stakeholder-facing summary, while keeping the underlying logging flow fast and low-friction for designers.

  3. 03

    Make every project its own register. Supported multiple projects with custom colour coding and row-level data isolation, so a register never mixes debt across unrelated products.

  4. 04

    Design for the export, not just the dashboard. Built CSV and Excel export from the start, since most stakeholder conversations about UX debt still happen in a roadmap doc or a review deck, not inside the tool.

07

Solution

A UX debt register combining fast issue logging with a scored, trend-tracked dashboard, so usability and accessibility issues get the same visibility as engineering bugs.

  • A full debt register with severity, status, category and ownership fields
  • A weighted 0–100 health score, colour-coded and tracked over a 30-day trend
  • Rich-text descriptions, file attachments and threaded comments per issue
  • CSV and Excel export for roadmap and stakeholder reviews

Keep exploring

More experiments worth trying.

More time for what really matters.