How to Successfully Redesign Your Product?
Once you have created a unique, well-designed product, this does not mean it will stay in that way forever. Digital products are basically living organisms. As time goes by, everything, including your product, needs to be changed in order to comply with the necessities of the current trends in the market.
Therefore, we will address an important concept, “redesigning,” that is necessary to make sure your product survives and thrives as time passes. After elaborating the possible reasons for redesigning, we will explain how to achieve a successful redesign in 5 steps.
Why Might You Need A Redesign?
Referring to “design” brings the idea of creating something from scratch, resulting in a timeless piece. However, this definition does not apply to the digital world because what does not come to mind is even the perfectly designed products need to be redesigned after a while due to the fast-paced, changing needs of the market and the customers in today’s world. The need to be redesigned makes a product dynamic so that your product can fulfill the changing needs of the market and the users while providing a good UX. Therefore, redesigning, as well as designing, is a crucial process for UX.
As your product loses its functionality or demands changes, it might signal in different ways as in the following:
Declining conversion rates
When a considerable amount of users do not take the desired action, this shows that there is something wrong with the user experience. Although the causes of bad user experience, which results in declining numbers of conversion rates, might be due to many reasons, this generally indicates it is time to consider redesigning the problematic areas.
Weak retention rates
The declining or low subscription rate indicates either the users have a better alternative for your product or they dislike it at all. Either way, redesigning your product in order to create stronger communication with the users seems like a good choice to increase the retention rates.
Entering a new market
One of the illusions in the marketing world is attempting to apply global marketing trends to every local market regardless of their cultural preferences. When the market research is properly done, the research might yield some cultural trends that indicate some redesigning needs to be done before launching. Redesigning based on local trends is essential in achieving good communication between your product and local users.
Receiving an increasing number of dissatisfied feedback
The most straightforward method of understanding what is wrong or good about your product is listening to the feedback that is coming from your users. When a trend is seen among the complaints coming from the users, this indicates a possible issue that needs to be redesigned.
Staying outdated
In a technology-based market, everything evolves so fast that even skipping the agenda or innovation revolving around the market for a little while might cause you to have an outdated product. Even the changing environment, like the Covid-19 pandemic, might impose some other requirements that leave your product outdated. For example, your product might need mobile optimization, the website might look old-fashioned, or poor performance might affect findability poorly, which is affected by search engine rankings. In those cases, redesigning your product is urgent to catch up with the competitors.
As you can see, there are many reasons why a product might need a redesign. The common idea of all the points presented above is that if data tells you that your product’s value and user satisfaction will increase after the redesign, you should definitely consider redesigning.
However, the real challenge of redesigning lies in basic human behavior, which is the desire to stick to the habits. Most people prefer what they know over what is different. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense because why bother to spend time and energy while adapting a novel thing?
Therefore, if you are going to apply a redesign, you have to have a strong rationale behind the change, so your users can find it meaningful to spend time and energy to adapt to the newness. Otherwise, your users will feel dissatisfied while facing experimental and arbitrary changes in your product.
What Is the Process of Redesigning a Product?
After you decide there is a concrete reason behind the redesign, there are several processes you can follow to achieve a successful redesign. Here, we compiled them into 5 steps:
Step 1: Define Your Business Goals
Before initiating any project, you should define your business’ objectives firstly.
What does the company want to achieve? What does the company want to change? When the team faces a challenge, how will they react?
As you elaborate on those questions more, you will bring up a clear investment plan while specifying a strategy for a redesign. Also, sharing those objectives with other team members ensures that everybody on the team is in the same boat along the process.
Step 2: Get User Feedback
As we have stated above, the most straightforward way to gather data about your product is to get user feedback. Which aspects of your product are liked by the users? Which parts of your product are disliked by the users? What are the expected features that the users desire?
When those questions are answered with qualitative and quantitative data, the redesign plan is more clarified.
Step 3: Make the Improvements
Based on the teams’ strategy and user feedback, now it is time to implement changes to your product.
While conducting the improvements, it is essential to remember that redesigned product is the better version of the previous one but not the completely different version of it. The redesigned product should look familiar to your users, so your product should not turn into a completely different product after the redesign.
Step 4: Create A Launch Plan
When the necessary improvements for redesigning are made on your product, it is time to present it to the users. For the redesigned product’s launch, a plan is needed firstly to decide how the redesigned features will be explained to the users.
As we stated previously, users do not suddenly welcome the changes because they would prefer what they are accustomed to. Therefore, a successful launch is essential not to alienate the users. A good strategy might be conducting A/B testing before the launching or presenting a beta version of your product. Otherwise, a failed launching process might result in losing users.
Step 5: Get More Feedback & Keep Improving
When the redesigned product is being launched, the process does not end there. The newly redesigned product needs to be monitored its impact and improvements by gathering feedback to make sure user onboarding operates without a problem.
After the launch, it is possible to realize some points to adjust or change, so your product should be open to being improved continuously. In other words, redesigning is a never-ending, dynamic process that needs to be monitored and tackled constantly.
🔥Key Takeaways🔥
👉Redesigning is the process of revealing the better version of your product while aligning it with the needs and the requirements of both the market and the users.
👉Redesigning is a costly process. And therefore, if the redesigning makes the company see a higher ROI, then it should be attempted.
👉To achieve a successful redesigning, there are five steps that can be followed:
1)determining business goals,
2)gathering user feedback,
3)implementing changes,
4)planning on launching,
5)gathering feedback after the launching and making the necessary adjustments based on that feedback.
