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Experience debt

A method to turn scattered knowledge into strategic action

Handout notes for the talk by Chiara Scarabotti, UX Lead, Springer Nature · UX Brighton 2026 · Emerging methods

The talk in 30 seconds

Known user problems pile up like an ever-growing task list: invisible, scattered, then forgotten.

Experience debt names the condition: the gap between what users need and what our experience enables.

Capture, Connect, Resolve is the method for managing it.

The implementation can vary, but starting small is the best approach: a spreadsheet with four columns is enough; the habit matters more than the tool.

1. Why this started

Have you ever felt that your products are accumulating user problems over time, and that their complexity and dependencies are also hard to represent? I’ve experienced this feeling too, so I started to focus on how to make this information visible and actionable for everyone.

In conversations with teams and leadership, I kept hearing the same questions. Some were detailed (where is the evidence for this?), others strategic (what pattern are we missing?). They are questions about the past, present and future of a problem, and answering them meant digging every time, with answers that kept changing. We did not lack knowledge. We lacked control of it.

Three things were getting in the way:

2. The concept: borrow the persistence of technical debt

Engineers preserve knowledge about technical problems as technical debt. The word sounds negative, but it makes the cost of ignoring a known issue explicit, like a bill waiting to be paid. More importantly, a known issue becomes an object worth maintaining even when attention moves elsewhere. The question I asked: could known user problems get the same persistence?

Experience debt can represent the accumulated gap between what users need and what the current experience enables. If a user is still experiencing the gap, it is part of the debt, regardless of how it originated: design compromises, usability and accessibility issues, unmet needs, and so on. Keeping this wide view matters, because removing things from the picture can remove connections we do not yet understand.

Debt defines the condition. It does not tell us how to manage it. That is the method.

3. The method: Capture, Connect, Resolve

Capture Connect Resolve
Fights Problems being invisible Knowledge being scattered Problems being forgotten
Gives a problem A home and a persistent identity A context and a strategic meaning A history and a future
In practice One framed problem, one unique ID, linked to the user goal (or Job To Be Done) it blocks and to its sources Explicit relationships between problems: causes, blocks, shares a root cause Every hypothesis and solution attached to the same problem; debt is paid only when the experience changed
You get Self-explanatory problems you can interrogate, cite and use Cross-journey, JTBD and business views Product, design and leadership views (enriched with connections and previously captured metadata)

4. A worked example: UX-301

Imagine a hotel booking system. Problem UX-301 is: “Guests cannot tell if their hotel reservation was successful.”

The rule for paying the debt

A problem is crossed off from the debt only when we have evidence that the experience changed for the better, not only if we shipped something.

5. One debt, different ways to work with it

Experience debt aims to answer all the questions that teams and leadership keep asking about user problems. We have experimented with different interfaces, so that more disciplines can interrogate it. These are examples of three different ways to work with the same experience debt, but the method is tool-agnostic.

Tool Style How you navigate
Jira Structurally Navigate by fields, metadata, queries, and boards. Ask: what problems relate to a user type, JTBD or source? Which are active, dormant or resolved?
Miro Visually Navigate through journeys and connections. Ask: where does the problem live on the journey? What are the direct connections between experiences?
AI agent Conversationally Navigate by asking. What do we know about this issue? What are the biggest systemic problems? Is this evidence new, or does it relate to an existing issue?

6. Start small: four columns, then connections

You do not need Jira, AI or a complicated taxonomy. A spreadsheet with four columns is already a basic form of Capture and Resolve; add a fifth for relationships and you are beginning to Connect. Customise it as your knowledge grows.

Problem Source JTBD Status Connects with
User cannot confirm the action succeeded User interviews; Stakeholders Complete with confidence Ideating Relates to #4
Important information is easy to miss CSAT comments; Marketing research Make an informed decision Validating  
The same details must be entered twice Analytics; Support Finish in one go Backlog Blocks #11

Problem, Source and JTBD = Capture · Status = Resolve · Connects with = Connect

Then build a habit, not just a database:

7. One last reflection, and what to take home

Shaping this, I incorporated ideas that already existed: atomic research, JTBD, systems thinking for relationships, and an outcome-driven, Lean UX approach for resolution. None is new on its own, but in isolation none of them served the main purpose.

What emerged was a way of organising them around the lifecycle of a user problem. A new method does not need brand new ingredients; it can emerge from combining existing ones.

Next time you face an overwhelming list of known problems

Begin with one problem. Make it visible, connect it, and keep it alive. If a problem is not captured, it stays invisible, so it cannot be connected and becomes harder to prioritise.

8. Reading list

The ideas and methods that inspired this work:

Capture

Connect

Resolve

Other formats

First page of Chiara Scarabotti's Experience debt handout (PDF) Download the handout (PDF)