To Redesign or Not to Redesign Your Product: A Solution to Eliminate Doubts

Redesign is a sore point in the field of product design. Often the final result is no better than the original, and the only metric that grows is the level of user frustration.

Designers' portfolios are full of examples of "fake redesigns", where they show how they would improve the existing design of popular brands or products. This can create the impression that almost everything can look much better if you redo everything.

To better understand the situation, let's look at a few examples of redesign

When we decided to compile a list of redesign success and failure stories, it turned out that often the quality of design is judged based on subjective criticism. Most companies avoid publicly sharing the results of their research.

At the same time, public opinion tends to condemn new designs of popular products immediately after they appear. This is also true for website and logo redesigns. These waves of criticism also create the impression that redesign fails more often than it succeeds. We found a few examples of product redesigns that can be backed up with real data.

Redesign of Busuu's Push Notifications

Push notifications are a pain for designers. They need to be relevant, valuable, and timely. However, in most apps, they look like a desperate attempt to grab the user's attention and make them open the app again.

The language learning app Busuu wanted to stand out from its competitors. The goal of popular learning apps is to get users to use the app daily. So they use push notifications to remind users. And naturally, 60% of users disabled notifications, and the rest just ignored them until they figured out how to opt out.

Instead of saying: "It's been two days since you did anything to learn French. Shame on you!", Busuu asks users a question about what words they learned last time. Here's what it looks like.

Personalization and intrigue (a question) worked excellently. The number of opened push notifications increased by a whopping 300%, and revenue on Android increased 10 times with the same number of notifications sent.

Runtastic and the User Mystery

In lifestyle apps, the first screens can make or break the bank. Runtastic (now Adidas Running), a fitness app, decided to change the design of the premium screen to test whether showing a user review instead of an advertising claim would attract users.

Instead of taking a risk and changing the design right away, they first conducted A/B testing. Two versions of the premium screen were shown to different users.

The test showed that the new design led to a 44% increase in premium subscriptions for Android users, while there was no significant change for iOS users. So Runtastic changed the design of the premium screen only in the Android version.

This case is especially interesting because it shows how data can reveal completely unexpected results. Without segmentation, the results would have shown a 22% increase in premium subscriptions, and the future opportunity to improve results for iOS would have been missed.

And if you're wondering why there is such a disparity in results, I must confess that I have no idea. This story tells us that in design, we must trust user testing, even if we can't always explain the reasons for user behavior.

Icons8. Less is Less

This story is about how "clean" and "minimalistic" design makes your website less user-friendly. This happened in 2017, when the UX world was obsessed with "cluttered" interfaces.

Icons8 is a website that sells icons. In addition to downloading ready-made icons, users could request the ones they needed. Requests with the most votes were selected by Icons8 designers.

As a result of the redesign, the vote count was only visible when hovering over the voting area. Consequently, people voted less simply because they didn't see that option. In metric terms, user engagement dropped by 50%. Here's what it looked like.

Why Redesign Fails: Main Reasons

Focus Solely on Aesthetics 

This is a very common pattern we see among product owners who come for a redesign: they see that some major successful products use trendy design, and they just want to follow that path by redesigning their apps in a similar way.

But not all of them know that trendy design is just the tip of the iceberg. The best companies go through a long process of research, design, and iterations to achieve that clean and trendy look that might seem to you like a Wix product.

Did you know that Dropbox has over 100 UI/UX designers? Yes, an app that is not often seen in best design lists actually invests a lot of resources in design. And yet they use the same blue color as many other apps. Speaking of blue, did you know that Microsoft once made $80 billion after choosing the right shade?

100 designers could create various creative and original projects that would immediately appear on awwwards.com, but that's not what they do. All their experience and wisdom are needed to decide what exactly and how to change so that users are satisfied.

Dropbox designers don't make 100 different design options to pick the best one. They research, test, analyze, measure effectiveness, and improve each version to get the best result on the hundredth iteration.

Assuming What Users Need Instead of Asking Them

It's not often that you hear from users: "We really want this app to be redesigned." In most cases, people hate it when their favorite products undergo a redesign. Adapting to a new interface is hard, and people generally prefer what they are already used to.

If you ask users first, you can make them happier and save a lot of time and resources that would otherwise go into complex design processes. To learn how to ask the right questions and avoid bias, check out our guide "How to Talk to Users."

Implementing a Redesign Without Testing

Here's a story that happened with Walmart in 2009. With the best intentions to make their stores more convenient for shoppers, they conducted a survey asking: "Would you like Walmart to be less cluttered?"

Guess the result - naturally, people answered "yes". Walmart managers, pleased that they followed the aforementioned rule, cleaned up the stores by removing 15% of inventory. As a result, sales dropped, and Walmart suffered staggering losses of 1.85 billion rubles.

One could say the question implied bias, but questions are never 100% unbiased. Testing is much more reliable. If Walmart had tested the cleaning system in one or two stores before overhauling the entire chain, they would have noticed the negative trend, and such huge losses could have been avoided.

At our company, we have a list of "red flags" that tell us that a redesign might not be the best idea. These are things we sometimes hear from potential clients:

• We want it to look beautiful
• Our design is outdated. We'd like something similar to Stripe
• We are not satisfied with our metrics, so we want a redesign.

These are signals that the client doesn't have a very clear idea of the redesign process and goals.

Evolutionary Design

This approach is more natural and holistic. Instead of making drastic changes, we focus on those parts of the design that truly need improvement and go through a series of iterations until we achieve the desired result.

Remember those TV shows where participants get makeovers: new clothes, a trendy haircut, quick "coaching", and they become a new person. How long do these people stay the same after the cameras are off? Exactly, no more than a couple of months.

On the other hand, changes resulting from personal evolution can last a lifetime, although it takes more than a week.

Returning to UX design, evolution is a way to dynamically respond to product needs. Evolutionary design creates the ideal ground for applying design thinking.

So... to Redesign or Not? 

Before answering that question, you can go through the following redesign readiness checklist:

• UX audit
• Performance analysis
• Defined goals
• Analysis of other solutions