Experience Rot: The Organic Decay Into Complexity

Experience rot happens when teams continually add features and capabilities to their websites, products, and services. It’s an organic process where, as functionality increases, complexity grows, and experience decays.

This organic process goes unnoticed for many teams until it becomes a growing problem, making the product or site increasingly more challenging to onboard, navigate, use, and maintain. New capabilities become more costly to add, and the proliferating decay opens a door for competitors to offer a more straightforward (and often less functional) solution that attracts the product’s users and customers.

In this presentation, we’ll discuss the (almost) inevitable organic root causes of experience rot, what teams can do about it, and the role information architects can play to thwart it.