The problem

Since BigCommerce opened for business in 2009, no one had performed a large-scale design audit of the platform and it was starting to show. The platform was full of outdated, broken, wrong or just plain bad copy and design.

The copy was particularly inconsistent, which is no great surprise considering there were no content guidelines in place. Each designer wrote their own copy. As a result, each product domain within BigCommerce tended to have its own content rules and style.

The goals

I had 4 goals in mind with this project:

1. Complete a full, end-to-end design audit of the BigCommerce platform

2. Develop and lead the design debt strategy for the product design team

3. Optimize working processes between design and product management

4. Improve the overall product quality

What I did

Since I was new to BigCommerce and I was performing copy audits one way or another, I suggested that we broaden the scope and turn the copy audits into complete design audits. I scheduled weekly sessions with each domain team: product designer, product manager, UX researcher and myself as the UX writer.

Using a design audit template from FigJam, we tagged screenshots from BigCommerce with 4 kinds of debt, each with its own color-coded sticky:

• Copy - does not follow content guidelines, typo or grammatical error

• Navigation - broken, no affordance where there should be or lacks appropriate signifiers

• Interaction - confusing, weird, difficult or doesn’t match the user’s expectations

• Styling - does not follow visual style guidelines

As the UX writer, I was focused on auditing the copy. However, anyone was free to comment on anything.

My design debt dashboard in FigJam. Here you can see some of the audit sessions I conducted, organized by product domain and/or workflow.

A typical design debt audit session in FigJam. Screenshots are taken of each step in a given workflow. We time-blocked each screen for 3 to 5 minutes, attaching color-coded stickies for any design debt that we could find.

The challenges

Once the audits were done and all the high-fives exchanged…

• I exported all the tickets to Jira

• Manually tagged all tickets by design debt type

• Assigned tickets to the appropriate product domain

The challenge now was to figure out how to actually fix all the tickets we created. We ended up with over 800 design debt tickets in Jira. A little over half were my copy fixes.

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge

The product managers were key to getting these design debt tickets fixed, but I had to sell them on the idea first.

I scheduled design debt prioritization meetings with each domain team. In these meetings I likened the process we were going through to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge is so big that by the time you get from one end to the other, the side you started on needs to be painted again. Likewise, auditing is a never-ending process that needs to be included in team calendar planning. The process eventually gets easier once you make maintenance a regular thing, rather than put it off for several years.

Returning once again to FigJam, we used a simple impact-effort matrix to plot the tickets out, ultimately focusing our efforts on quick wins and big bets. Many of my copy fixes fell under “fill-ins” — not much effort, but not much impact either. For example, “make this page sentence case” or “remove serial comma.”

We agreed to assign a small number of story points every sprint (the number of points changing based on workload) for fixing these tickets. The rest of the tickets were classified as either bugs or BAU (business as usual).

We tracked the resolution of our tickets using a Jira dashboard I co-created with another designer.

A simple impact-effort matrix we used to prioritize design debt tickets.

A look at the design debt dashboard I created with another designer. This widget shows the design debt we created over the past 6 months versus how much we are resolving. The initial spike is from the audit I conducted.

The results

All told, the design debt audit took about 7 months to complete. With the processes I put in place, BigCommerce resolves between 50 and 100 design debt tickets every quarter. The design team continues to hold audit meetings every quarter to ensure new product and feature releases meet standards for quality and the company keeps “painting the bridge.”