The UX Redesign Process

Typically, a redesign for a digital platform is sought when either the developers, the design team or an entire company loses its vision of the target user experience. The result, poor page values, poor ROIs and low conversion rates.

To many naive users of the platform, a redesign may look just like a facelift. No more, no less. However, for a User Experience designer, the entire redesign process means much more than a lot of research, meticulous planning, iterating, and gallons of coffee!

It will take you just eight minutes to read this article, and you will know much about the UX redesign process!

The UX Redesign Challenge

With a user experience to redesign, as a designer, one fact that must be drop dead clear that we as designers shouldn’t design for ourselves; the brand of the company, their value proposition, the user segments, their targets, everything needs to be taken care of independently and minutely. It cannot be assumed that the problem is widespread enough that the entire things can be redesigned and it’s worth the effort.

The UX Redesign’s main challenge is to recognize, understand and validate if a problem on hand is worth solving!

1. Look into the webpages and recognize if the user experience satisfies you
2. Look into the brand experience and understand if the value proposition and the brand goals are aligned to the user experience
3. Look into the user reviews and validate if the user experience needs rebranding

A user experience redesign challenge ALWAYS comes with a time constraint. And therefore, at times of redesign, designers and developers both might commit to finding the quickest way to understand the problem, redesign and bring a solution. However, it would be a sin to redesign UX without following a procedure that is required to understand each brand/ product/ service and its user experience uniquely.

The UX Redesign Process

1. Know the brand

Once it is known that we now have a user experience redesign challenge on hand, the first thing to be done is to know and understand the brand, thoroughly.

Brand research always helps! Interview their users, conduct surveys, focus group discussions or measurement tools like Google Analytics or TestMySite.

While knowing the brand, it is essentially important to also know their competitors and their strengths. So, how do you actually know the brand you will be redesigned the UX for

1. Identify the audience of the brand
2. Map all stakeholders currently interacting with the brand
3. Get to know their interaction stories: happy and sad
4. Collect first insights and design an action plan
5. Implement the plan and evaluate the results

2. Research — Understand — Experience

A. UX Research

UX Research is termed as the investigation of users, their requirements, needs, demands, motivations, and goals. This step is essentially important as this is the time we investigate and find the flaws or the factors of failure of the user experience.

With UX research, you must aim to gather information from users by way of a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, contextual inquiries, personas, card sorting, and usability testing. And this process of UX Research will ultimately help a design team inform the design of products and services, validate its assumptions, and more importantly, reduce the cost of delivering a successful product knowing the points of improvement.

B. Understanding UX

Once we’re done with the research of what new is being demanded by the users and figuring out the points that lead the earlier UX down, we move forward to understand the revised UX, its design process and the brand new UX strategies.

Understanding UX involves engaging with and observing your target users, getting to know their needs, behaviors, and pain-points in relation to the product or service you’re REdesigning.

3. Align the Goals of the Brand

Your brand is the heart of your business. Creating a UX that meets the needs of your customers in lines with the goals of the brand create interactions that are beneficial and meaningful to both your company and your users. To map your user experience with the goals of the brand:

1. Build your design exclusively for the business
2. Develop a tangible brand vision that is easily understood
3. Map your short, medium, long term goals into achievable, bite-sized milestones
4. Work in an agile fashion to meet the goals
5. Measure success and manage consistency across teams
6. Map your existing customer journey and plot the revisions
7. Experience your brand from a user’s perspective
8. Pinpoint how your business objectives can be aligned with your UX
9. Ensure the operational side of your business can deliver on the promises made to the users.

4. RE-DESIGN

1. Empathize: Empathy mapping can never go wrong. With the empathy map, you visualize user attitudes and behaviors that help UX design teams align on a deep understanding of the end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data. It makes you understand the motivation of the users to arrive at your platform
2. Define: While redesigning UX, if we redefine the problem statement, it makes us better understand the user emotions, and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. Redefining should include practical, experiential, effective, meaningful and valuable aspects of user experience
3. Ideate: Ideation is the heart of the redesign process. In the ideation process, you must focus on generating a LOT and lots of broad set of ideas on a given topic, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them and pantomime what design would best suit your brand-new UX
4. Prototype: Create a mixture of sketches, wireframes, animations or mockups for usability testing. The early sample designs or model should act as a near exact replica and deduce feedbacks from its usability
5. Feedbacks: Learn, explore, experience and share the results of the usability testing on your redesigned UX. Feedbacks are essentially important as you get a reality check on your redesign, even before you deploy your redesign
6. Iterate: Repeat steps 1–5 till you’re confident of your redesign

5. Carry out a UX Audit

Once the design is ready to be deployed, I suggest conducting a UX audit for a clearer picture of the redesign usability and success. The UX Audit will identify the weak areas of your product and reveal what parts of the platform are the headaches for users.

So, the question now is: What happens during UX audit and why to conduct it?

During a UX audit, an auditor uses a variety of measurement tools and methods, metrics to analyze where a product is going wrong or right.

1. Review of business and user objectives using conversion metrics
2. Customer care, sales data
3. Traffic/engagement
4. Compliance with UX standards
5. Usability heuristics
6. Mental modeling
7. Wireframing & Prototyping
8. UX Best Practices

Usability Testing v/s UX Audit

The difference between usability testing and a UX audit is their information flow direction: an audit infers problems from a set of pre-established standards or goals, whereas testing infers problems from user actions. Granted, an auditor may use usability testing during an audit if they do not have access to the fundamental metrics, but they will combine the results with data collected over the longer term and weigh them up against industry standards and product goals. (source)

A good blog to follow more on UX Audit, find here.

6. Implement and Evaluate

While the technical team may start the implementation while the design phase is in progress or early stages of the process, implementing the redesigns all at once in the end also. Implementing the UX design along with the re-developed UI with complete functionality and user experience

Evaluation is an iterative process. The design team validates the product in terms of user flow and experience and identify areas where improvements are needed. While you evaluate your end product, ask the following questions to your redesigned user experience.

1. Whether the redesigned UX is usable?
2. Is it easy to interact for the end user?
3. Is the design flexible and easy to change?
4. Does it provide the desired solution to user’s problems?
5. Does the product have the credibility that makes someone want to use it because of the experience it provides?

With implementation and evaluation of the final design, you’re all set to go with your new and improved user experience!

Conclusion

An amazing user experience redesign can only be provided by following an iterative and intricate design process.

The first 6 seconds while the user interacts with your platform establishes your game in the digital world. Either you focus on the business or make your text on the transaction page 12pt!

It solely is your decision what to revise but revamping the main page, creating a polished new design services page, enhanced brand image, and a more clear value proposition definitely brings a higher affinity of users to associate with your brand.

I hope this article helps your redesign process function better. Happy UXing! Cheers!