Case study: Product redesign a paradigm shift
Overview
Every design journey upskills the designer who is crafting, drives through new processes, and most of all leaves behind the beautiful experiences that only a design animal can cherish.
The gig designer gets when a product is out in the market is immense, it literally doubles up when you launch a re-design.
In this article, I attempt to capture how designer emotes? , why the redesign is triggered? , when is the right time? and what is the right ratio of change?.
Also highlighted how a redesign can influence the story to the customers and help customers indulge in the product seamlessly through a process.
Ambiguity zone
Re-design should be a carefully crafted procedure, something similar to Air-to-Air refueling in the sky. As you already have an aircraft just that it needs new fuel to be injected.
For a product designer, such tasks are a real challenge and equally adds up pressure and ambiguity. When a designer acknowledges ambiguity and tries to apply proper planning to resolve them, it would result in innovation.
Re-design for a full-fledged product is no joke and it cannot be executed overnight radically. Designers tend to have an instinct in response to certain stimuli in design experiences. Such thoughts are supposed to be streamlined to arrive at a more structured and practical process to plan for a redesign.
Rationale
(Why and when to redesign)
The redesign is the most expensive effort for any business directly influencing the budget. Time since the previous design is launched to the new approach is a very important expense scale for such design exercise. It gets costlier when the timeframe is very less.
On a regular analysis, there can be negative signals from the market and users, which will demand redesign. That's what I call a paradigm shift moment.
A redesign can also be initiated by other factors also such as
- Not keeping up with the trend
- Very bad CSAT score
- Results of competitor benchmarking
- Not adapting future technologies and devices
Any investment in the right design executed right time is always better than bad design leading to a disaster.
Businesses change their product only for the following reasons as per Florian Deißenböck:
- To correct (Corrective change)
- To adapt (Adaptive change)
- To prevent (Preventive change)
- To perfect (Perfective change)
Caution!
Whenever a redesign is triggered because of fake market signals, unproven user behavior data, and having a weak design process it could lead to failure.
Also for legacy applications, change aversion, and the new learning curve is a frustration factor to consider. So onboarding the right process to come up with a redesign is very important.
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.” — Dr. Ralf Speth, Chief Executive Officer, Jaguar Land Rover
Radical or incremental
Before setting up the process for design, planning a frictionless execution plan is most important. Though the decision completely depends on the current state of the product, keeping customers informed and aware of what's happening with the product through all communication means is essential.
Following are ways to keep users informed:
- Personalized emails
- Surveys
- In-product notifications
- Demos
- Webinars
The process
Is there’s a process on why redesign? The straightforward answer is redesign is not reskinning! Reskinning can impact the perception of the users as it can love it or hate it mostly without impacting the experience,
but a redesign can impact the overall product experience and usability so scripting a process is crucial.
Though there is numerous process out in the industry to understand the problem statement, conduct research, analyze the behavior, design, and test, I personally believe when it comes to redesigning there’s no one size fits all approach.
Every design project demands its own tailored process to execute a perfectly crafted product experience. For a re-design exercise, similar to the final product it is equally important to come up with a more appropriate process that ultimately reduces friction.
A design process can truly evolve by clearly understanding the nature of the product, its current state, users' needs, and business goals. The following process (LADDER) was adopted for one of my major redesign projects in the past year.
Introducing LADDER - 6 stage process tailored for redesign
#1: Listen
Always don’t assume the user behavior which results in The false-consensus effect (People’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context).
Understand who is your audience and classify them by persona based on their skills and wants.
Recruit users or representatives to make them perform desired tasks in the current/old product and capture every single pain point, listen to them, and observe the behavior to the last detail.
“You are not the user” | “People ignore design that ignores people.” — Frank Chimero, Designer
#2: Articulate
There are always a few questions in our minds at the beginning of any design. Who are my users?
Why did they choose our product?
What are their expectations?
Answering these questions helps us script a very natural empathetic story that defines the journey of the user.
A great story will itself clarify its problem and clearly drives us towards the solution statement. At the earlier stage of the process, this story mostly is in a Draft state. The story can start with various influencing factors such as customer pain points, user behavior metrics, or market signals.
“Every great design begins with an even better story.” — Lorinda Mamo, Designer / Creative Director
#3: Deconstruct
Explore the entire product by empathizing with being in your user's shoes. Break down all modules, journeys, navigations, information architecture, components, and pixels and spread over the board of ideation that will help you restructure block by block that brings bring harmony and rhythm to the new solution statement without any bias.
Every product should have its own personality, it is nothing but a connection that you feel with any product based on time to get used or the scale of delight which you perceive from a product. In a re-design exercise crafting the right personality is key. Deconstruct is most important to develop a new personality and character to a product without any influence of existing journey.
“More options, more problems.” — Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer
#4: Design
Designing an experience for a redesign exercise is a bit different from a fresh design. Though there is a clear advantage of having learnings from an old or existing design, it is very challenging for a designer to meet all the expectations.
Finally, this is the phase we get to see a tangible output with which we will be able to measure the outcomes.
Every method in the phase is curated to the persona's needs and expectations.
Information Arhitecture
Products get complex to the user, only when the primary navigation and the leading functions don’t flow naturally that the user can learn themselves.
The very first action in the redesign is to reconstruct the information architecture that has zero learnability and guides them through the missions seamlessly.
Sketch
I always believe whenever every designer arrives at a solution he runs through all the possible iterations in mind though it is necessary to sketch fewer options on paper or design to visually feel and if required to get perception feedback.
Prototype
With all the learning from the previous stages and understanding the trend and design system, the redesigned interface should be carefully crafted with seamless interaction which is self-learning, usable and delightful from the previous experience.
“The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.”
— Blake Ross, Co-creator of Mozilla FirefoxIf there’s a ‘trick’ to it, the UI is broken. — Douglas Anderson
“Usability is not a quality that can be spread out to cover a poor design like a layer of peanut butter.” — Clayton Lewis
#5: Examine
Now compare every task flows and journeys from the previous to new and test the experience from all possible aspects including time to accomplish, ease of use, and managing.
User testing
Repeat the first step again #1 Listen from your users by facilitating a user testing session with a clickable prototype and hear the feedback by asking them to think aloud and observe every little touchpoint with the user interface. This data from quite a few samples would really motivate us to assure everything is right starting from decisions we have made, approaches we have aligned to and elements & interaction we have chosen for the design.
This should be a continuous process from the design stage to even after the product goes live.
Feedback and CSAT
Continuos product feedback and CSAT will help understand the shift that the product has acquired and understood to what extent the new redesign is helping users achieve their goals.
Change aversion
Users generally get frustrated with the new design only on the following factors:
When it involves a lot of learnability
There is no meaningful change
The current product setup is broken
When the redesign is based on Florian Deißenböck’s reasons for change, there won't be any change aversion from the users.
Continuously hearing from the user and testing the product internally and externally helps you overcome the aversion that your users may experience.
Confirmation bias
The redesign is similar to a spaceflight launch. Spaceflight gets ignited and propels after a backward counting and it's still monitored by a scientist until it reached orbit and doesn’t end there, it still monitored all the way to the destination station or planet. Redesign projects even after so much data and signals it can still need final touch or maybe somethings differently. Any biases to your idea or the approach can spoil the product's progress. The simpler way to overcome this is to be open and start listening again.
“Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users.” — Dana Chisnell
“Usability testing is the killing field of cherished notions.” — David Orr
#6: Reap ROI
Sustainable product growth and adoption are essential, on a major release such as redesign, understanding market pulse, product sales, and adoption is a key factor.
Measuring the ROI of the product after a redesign is the most important tool to measure the success of all the investment and effort that has gone through.
Conclusion
For a product redesign time spent on understanding users, pain points, market, and the trend is more important than just concentrating on the design of it.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
— Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
The LADDER process highlighted above can just be a blueprint for inspiration, yet as recommended earlier every product demands its own process to be tailored for product experience success and to be a well-received redesign/paradigm shift.
🙏 Thanks for reading!
