Thumbnail I made for my portfolio today.

Why iterative design is better than major redesigns: 13 reasons

I had a plan to majorly overhaul my portfolio. Again. The problem with that is my current portfolio molders while we all wait for the redesign to deploy. Then I realized I’ve seen this problem happen with multiple work projects. The real product gathers dust and doesn’t get updates, while the team works on planning documents that may or may not ever see the light of day.

So based on this insight I wrote 13 reasons why it’s better to iterate on what you have now instead of waiting for a redesign or other kind of overhaul.

1. Major redesigns throw out legitimate work, both design and dev, that may have been working fine
2. While it’s nice to start with a fresh slate as a designer or developer even, you will also have to learn from new mistakes you don’t know about yet.
3. As opposed to iterating on what you already have, where you are more aware of the flaws and can improve them.
4. Iterative design is less exciting than total redesigns, but is more likely to succeed and less risky.
5. Many redesigns actually fail — see how the Sonos app redesign frustrated users and may have contributed to 100 layoffs. The app is full of concepts that force users into an ecosystem they don’t want instead of owning their device and using it in an agnostic fashion. It was a business driven decision that the users didn't want or ask for and the business suffered for it.
6. Iterative designs improve what you already have rather than expensive and risky redesigns that may not work at all.
7. Iterative designs take into account the existing technical stack and limitations — a scenario which obviously will not always work. Sometimes a new tech stack is necessary. But it’s possible to iterate in tech stack as well and to roll out bigger changes gradually building off the existing work as well instead of suddenly changing everything.
8. Iterative design introduces users to changes slowly which can avoid the shock effect that happens when users are introduced to something new — even if it’s better.
9. Iterative design can be easier to test. Because if you’re say working on a weekly basis, every week you can roll out changes to prod or a set of users and measure the results.
10. It is easier to revert if the change didn’t succeed.
11. It’s easier to roll out changes into reality instead of having a “North Star” document that never actually gets into prod.
12. It makes the focus of the business on what users actually see and use and not esoteric planning documents.
13. Efforts and improvements that the design and dev teams make are therefore less likely to be wasted in planning docs and more likely to get into users hands by deploying to prod.