How to redesign, step by step

There are many activities you can do to understand users better, build empathy. 

• User journeys and value propositions are beneficial, but there is not always time to do them when we are talking about something small. 
• Personas, on the other hand, are fluffy and fake and have very little practical application. 

An essential thing that you can do is to list Jobs to be done. This will help you understand the user’s motivations and expectations.

The number one mistake that designers do during the redesign process is that they completely ignore and disregard the current design. The worst thing you can do is to take the current design and create a new one based on your personal preferences. 

There was probably a ton of thinking and research that went into the creation of the original solution. Your goal is to carefully inspect the current design, try to understand how it works, and the intention behind each decision.

Once you narrowed down your focus to some key areas, you need to know the performance of the design. 

• Pageview and traffic analysis. Tracks your visitors’ entry and exit from different pages, what browser and screen size they are using, and where they are coming from.
• Behavioral flowchart. It helps you to understand how users behave and common journeys.
• Timing and conversion. Funnel creation and analysis. Analyzes conversion and creates baseline metrics to compare the new design.

It’s one of the first natural questions that should come to mind. “Well, what are others doing?” As your customers will have to choose between your product and its alternatives, you need to analyze the experience they provide to customers. 

When reviewing both direct and indirect competition, look for commonalities, similar flows. Define what is considered a standard experience for your case. You can collect all of your findings in the InVision board or any similar tool.

Fresh ideas and innovation are never coming from competitor analysis. As everyone keeps a close eye on each other, you can only learn what is considered to be a standard.

For inspiration, look beyond your domain. There are hundreds of amazing products that deal with similar problems that you are trying to solve in a different context.

Once you have understood everything clearly with the help of data from analytics, you can start identifying key problem areas with the existing design. 

Those problems can range from usability issues to visual flows, bugs, inconsistencies, wrong patterns applied, or exotic solutions without any reason.

Once you found out the issues, the next step is to find solutions for each identified problem. 

Competitive research and exploration should give you enough inspiration. 

Having a list of problems and ideas on how to solve them is a good thing, but it needs prioritization. 

We need to understand what are the low-hanging fruits. For each opportunity, we need to understand what it will take to deliver it and how much value we will add for the end-user.

There are no perfect designs, and there is always space for improvement. But excellent user experience comes at a great cost. Creating a marginal improvement in already great design will require exponentially more resources invested than taking something bad and turning it into an average design. 

Sometimes to substantially improve the experience, you need to reinvent it completely.

Hand sketches are great ways to start offloading some of the ideas from your head into the physical world. 

Each hour spent on low fidelity will save 10 hrs from being spent on high fidelity work later. Try to sketch a very rough idea of flow, have a quick validation, and add a layer of fidelity. 

Starting feedback sessions with presentation of high fidelity work may show your stakeholders that there is no space for changes, and their opinion was not taken in the account. 

It is as simple as that. Everyone can confidently say that they know better than the users, and 

“users don’t know they need it till they get it.” 

That statement is true only in a very rare case. Don’t forget that everything you are doing is for users. 

Like in a fancy restaurant, presentation is as important as the dish itself. If you spend months crafting a design, spend some time on presentation.

And remember you are not selling new styles, clean fonts. Create a new story, a story about newly empowered users, because humans are fascinated by stories and visions.

Users hate change, doesn’t matter how bad was the original design, they got used to it, and now they need to learn something new. 

Monitoring analytics post-release and keep in mind users will need to go through some initial adjustments. Give them some time to recover attitudes and fall in love with a new design. Support easy feature adoption with some contextual help and guidance.

The design process never stops. New patterns emerge, more tools become accessible by users. Smooth user experience comes when you truly understand the problem you are solving and help users solve it effortlessly.