UX Glossary | U
UX roadmap
Also: Design roadmap
A living plan that sets out and prioritises the UX team's future work.
A UX roadmap is the UX team’s own plan of what it will work on next, in priority order. It is a working document, revisited every month or quarter, not a poster signed off once a year.
What goes on it
More than the design for upcoming features. A realistic UX roadmap holds the research the team needs to run, the usability fixes that have been waiting, work on the design system, accessibility reviews, and time to retire design debt. Most of that never appears on a product roadmap, which is exactly why the UX team needs its own.
How to build one
Collect candidate work from three places: the product roadmap (what the business is building), known problems (support tickets, test findings, audit results) and the team’s own ideas. Then prioritise with something visible, such as an impact-effort matrix, so priorities come from criteria rather than from whoever asked last.
Common mistake
Building it as a queue of requests from other departments. Then the roadmap records demand and not need, and the team becomes a service desk. Leave room for work the team itself identifies as most valuable, and show the roadmap to stakeholders so they see what a “yes” to their request displaces.
A UX roadmap is also the base for two wider views: the field roadmap and the specialty roadmap.