Redesigning a digital product: 101

The lockdown has thrust several very useful apps on people and businesses. From work meetings and project collaborations to academia and shopping, a lot has moved online in a hurry. But in terms of design, several apps that have suddenly found wider adoption have scope for much improvement. Your product probably does too.

But how do you go about a redesign? Rather, do you even need to redesign? Let’s begin with that.

Redesigning a website or a mobile app is a tradition for designers. But little do people know about the effort that goes behind redesigning a product. It gets tougher when it comes to redesigning a feature.

Typically, when you propose a redesign to your product manager, the initial reaction tends to be: “What is wrong with the existing design?”, “Why do we have to do it now?”, “How much development effort will it consume?”

The only way to stop this from happening is to ask these questions yourself and go equipped with adequate data and reasoning.

Research before action

Streamlining user experience is usually one of the primary reasons for redesigning your product. When this is your goal, talk to these important people to begin with.

1. Users

Conduct a user study involving relevant customers before kickstarting a redesign process. This can be done through surveys or interviews or by mapping user journeys involving actual users and not someone representing them.

Always remember, your product manager is not your end-user.

2. Technical support team

They deal with customer problems every day. Talk to them on what customers want and try to understand what is stopping them from delivering those requirements. Collate the data together and see what can be addressed with the redesign. The technical support team can help you plan your redesign based on customer requirements.

Tampering with the existing experience

Product designers tasked with a redesign often come up with something radically different that could modify the existing flow or functionality. This is where we need to draw the line. There’s a saying in the tech world that ‘if a bug stays unresolved for a longer time than expected, it becomes a feature’.

Source: Pinterest

Observe the frequency of usage of an app or a feature and introduce incremental changes. Redesigning is tougher than creating a product from scratch because users have become accustomed to using a product in a certain way. Getting users to form a habit is difficult. Know what is even more difficult? Altering it.

Products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail.

Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

With the amount of talent on board, big tech companies can redesign their products in a week. They don’t do it often for they know that would tamper with the user’s habit.

An example of a redesign disaster is Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The position of its Start button and the interaction it required remained unchanged for 17 years. The submenu icons were given visual changes but the position was never altered. Especially the Shutdown button. The Windows OS required users to restart/shutdown the machine frequently and this feature was in an accessible place.

Source: Google.com

When Microsoft rolled out Windows 8, they not only changed the interaction but also hid the Shutdown button inside the settings. I still remember spending almost 10 mins searching for the Shutdown button before asking Google for help.

Source: Google.com

Involve the developers

When we are asked to redesign a product or a feature, we tend to think of the visual and the user experience but we fail to think of the life source—the code.

Even a simple change in a product requires contribution from all team members. Keeping the developers informed about your idea will help you get a better perspective on its feasibility. Certain aspects would have been made to work in a certain way due to technical restrictions.

Your research schedule should have a session with the developer who made the existing feature to understand why things were made to work that way. Developers often take a product redesign as an opportunity to clean up unused lines of code or refactor them.

Test the changes

We often make the mistake of testing the design changes with our team members and validate them based on the output. Instead, test the changes with a small group that has a mix of new and old users. Encourage your team to perform A/B testing.

This works very well when there is a conflict in the decision. You can compare the time and steps taken by the users to perform the intended action and come to a conclusion. Facebook and Google follow this method often and get amazing results.

Luke Wroblewski, Product Director at Google, did a study on the Facebook mobile app’s navigation bar and reported that at one point it had 29 versions of navigations bars live.

Source: Luke Wroblewski on Twitter

Educate before you ship

When your users encounter a bottleneck, the first thing they will do is look for help content or reach out to the customer support team. About 70% of the redesigns are not well-received by users because they are not educated properly. Several users often even report the design changes as bugs. Make sure you perform the following actions before rolling out an update.

  1. Educate the users by making an announcement or running a campaign prior to the release.
  2. Educate the customer support team. Present a detailed explanation of the changes made and the reasons behind them. If possible, conduct a demo session for the team. Equip them to handle the inevitable initial friction experienced by the users.
  3. Update all the outdated help content and make sure they go along with the update.

A team journey

Design is a never-ending process. If you want to scale, then redesigning is an inevitable part of your journey. Constantly listening to users and observing the trends can give you an upper hand and may lower the possibility of failing while redesigning. It is our duty to instill this thought in every team member’s mind and make them realize the value this brings to the product.

Several posts on the Dribble community for digital designers project redesign as an easy journey. That’s not true. The situation is very different when you try to alter user experience in a live product. Never forget that.

An earlier version of this blog first appeared on Medium.