Linkup Studio’s design teams confirmed that online businesses were losing up to 90% of potential users due to poorly designed sites before our product redesign works.
If an online store has a complicated buying process and customers cannot intuitively find a particular section or button, they will buy the product elsewhere.
If customers have trouble purchasing tickets in a concert app, they won't attend the event or will buy them in a more convenient app.
If a real estate platform has an application form that requires too much personal data and is hard to find in the listing, the customer won't submit it and will leave. This rule applies to almost any business.
That is why product redesign is so important and needed nowadays.
What are the primary purposes and benefits of design refresh and redesigning?
A design refresh in product redesign is a visual improvement. It involves changing the color and appearance of the user interface: forms, icons, pictures, videos, the appearance of elements, and more. It forms the customer's first impression of the app, site, or product.
According to Taylor & Francis Online research, it takes 0.05 seconds for a customer to like or dislike a digital product, so it is by no means a trivial task.
A simple design update can be compared to painting a car a different color, replacing cracked windows, and cleaning up its cabin.
Product redesign, in the same car analogy, means comprehensive and research-based improvements under the hood, such as upgrades in the engine, fuel distribution system, or transmission settings. Although not immediately apparent, these modifications significantly impact the driving experience.
Similarly, redesigning digital products like apps, websites, or other digital products involves a deeper-level approach to creating a solution that customers need and lack. It addresses business logic, product functionality, architectural design, and other core elements. It also includes upgrading backend software such as management systems, CRM, site CMS, site administration, and more, along with creating an attractive interface to make a more convenient digital customer experience redesign for a solution.
It entirely depends on your current market position, resources available, company goals, your ideas, and further development plan. At Linkup, we are always honest with our clients and recommend only thorough research-based solutions options to ensure they will make a difference for their business.
A number of clients with products that needed redesign approached us after unscrupulous companies took money for a complete product redesign but didn't deliver a valuable solution. Some contacted us after a design refresh, even though they apparently needed thoroughly redesigned products.
Our business analysis team has collected and structured all the insights we got working with startups and SMEs. They've formulated the following pivotal cases when products need redesign:
Most clients we have worked with in this product redesign service notice they need a redesign long before the breaking point. They carefully analyze the KPIs of their business, make plans, and regularly check their execution. If they notice problems and identify pain points, they ask for help with carefully formulated requests. We appreciate this and are particularly inspired to work with such customers.
When providing product redesign services, our design team has established a general procedure to make sure digital products are getting results. We'll outline the most extensive cycle we follow, but from project to project, the need and immersion in each step may vary according to your current business objective.
First, our business analysis team dives into the client's business: interviews them, and notes down business goals, values, challenges, target audience, existing market solutions, strategies, and sales channels. We also define the "success" characteristics of the collaboration to ensure we are on the same page.
Then, we move on to practical implementation and evaluation of the effectiveness of the current solutions. For this, we collect information from heatmaps (with visual data on clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement tracking) and/or conduct user surveys to get relevant information on what users are looking for and what critical points cause them not to complete targeted actions.
We also use specialized tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar to get information about users' location, their engagement with a product and conversion rates, traffic and sales, etc.
Depending on the project, we define user personas as well. For instance, we worked with a beauty industry platform that included several user types: members, experts, and businesses. To figure out each of these user types' setbacks and challenges, we conducted surveys and precisely identified their pain points to create a better user experience for all of them.
Once we obtain sufficient information from the steps above, we create a current customer journey map to identify bottlenecks and suggest subsequent improvements.
Before a comprehensive product redesign, we also use some of Jacob Nielsen's heuristics for a more complete evaluation of the current UX/UI design.
Then we gather all the received information in one place and form a single document called "UX Audit Report".
The next part of the analysis is a thorough study of competitors. Don Corleone instructed keeping enemies even closer than friends, which makes sense in this case as well. A go-to-market strategy involves knowing everything about existing solutions and seeing your business capabilities and capacity to meet the user needs you have previously uncovered.
For this purpose, our design and development team has developed convenient tables and charts showing all the features, advantages, and disadvantages of already functioning products. Before conducting research, we determine what data we are looking for and how to transform it into actionable indicators and form unique selling propositions, i.e determine what product functionality or client management aspects set your solution apart.
In our team, we are especially interested in defining digital product use cases. It helps us learn more about our users, the devices they use, and what trigger points make them use the solution. We take into account a variety of factors, including at what time, in what mood, or physical condition consumers interact with the product. Based on these seemingly minuscule situations, it's possible to significantly impact the end-user experience.
For example, our use case for a large translation and language learning platform revealed that users often use the app on the go with one hand, e.g., while riding the bus. As a result, we decided to reduce the amount of screen information and added side swipes to undo actions, making it more convenient to use.
The experience map is a follow-up to the previous steps. It describes the goals, questions, and concerns of different users at different stages of customer product interaction, such as awareness, consideration, and others, all the way up to the trial period or first transaction. This helps us prioritize your company's customer journey objectives more accurately and define KPIs to track the achievement of your goals.
When we accurately understand your business, current resources, and product users, our design architect specialists start creating the user experience design for a comprehensive product redesign.
The first step is creating a site map diagram. Its goal is to visualize website's structural hierarchy, interrelationships between pages, and navigation mechanism. A sitemap is an excellent tool for establishing user journeys, both internal and external links to sharpen the overall user experience.
The subsequent step is user flows, which are visual step-by-step linked blocks describing the actions for each section necessary to achieve its particular goal. Our frontend and backend developers point out that such descriptions and specifications help them greatly because they can then grasp the overall vision of the process and comprehend alternative user scenarios, including all possible triggers, threads, and errors.
All of the above leads to the creation of medium-fidelity wireframes. It gives stakeholders a visual representation of the product in a design layout with its main parts, graphics, sections, various blocks, buttons, filters, images, graph placement, and other elements depending on the digital product type. It helps present the solution and align the future product look with our team's and your company’s overarching idea.
During this stage, we use our expertise in creating visuals to make the clients' products memorable, visually appealing, and valuable to users. Furthermore, we also assist in achieving all of the mentioned business goals.
First, we create mood boards with our references and references from other sites, as well as related products outlining options for different design elements, styles, fonts, and more. Then our design team organizes a meeting with the client to sync up and figure out which elements they prefer.
Based on your preferences, we create a style option file that provides several layout examples. This allows business representatives to see the different UI choices and decide what they like best. In the end, we agree on the winning one.
Designers then create user interface layouts. Our team can make them from scratch or based on stakeholder vision with recommendations and guidelines.
Once they are agreed, we create a clickable prototype so testers and the client side can review the draft solution, make additional notes and discuss new proposals.
The next major component of product redesign is creating a design system, which contains all the rules for further design and coding to ensure the company’s brand consistency. With such a file, internal business teams can maintain the same visual appearance as the product is scaled and new features, product parts, and pages are added.
The design system includes style guidelines such as icons, element spacing, and libraries with navigation rules, design elements, overlays, and other.
Creating a pixel-perfect design is essential, but coding it accurately is just as important for a successful product redesign. If our clients plan to develop a product with a different team, we agree on convenient collaboration documents and depth of specification description. If Linkup continues development, a business analyst describes the key functional points and collaborates with each developer to create the highest quality product.
In general, development specifications include not only design descriptions such as colors, typography, and size but also product logic, rules, restrictions, validations, and many other explanations. It is necessary because developers may not get enough information about how the system works from the visual interface alone. For example, why some users are marked as "best sellers" but others are not - such information is described in the specifications.
The success of redesigning a digital product largely depends on proper and on-time development. In our best practices, companies that value project duration time can benefit by parallel starting the development phase immediately after the wireframes are ready.
Our clients also share that it’s essential to create a phased product launch and deploy new features little by little, considering that with these changes, we’re confusing and even stressing customers who got used to the product's previous appearance and functions.
Since it's never possible to develop an utterly perfect product, after launch our team continues to collect usage analytics and creates special reports for you with notices on further product changes based on trends in user behavior.
It is crucial to maintain the digital product as user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing for users. When you embark on a thorough product redesign, it is the right time to improve it. In this section, we’ve gathered the most recent and relevant upgrade ideas on how your digital solution can boost its value for users.
This is always relevant and a classic point among other product redesign ideas. Overly complex navigation is a barrier for users to reach their goals with your product. Try to streamline the user journey and make your product as easy to use as possible; this will likely lead to enhanced user satisfaction. Practically, this means consolidating your menus, simplifying forms, and testing key functionality to make sure they’re easily accessible.
Many products need redesign because users lack access to this solution on their devices, which they used to use. As a rule, responsive design is now a must, not optional. However, you still need to consider the type of your application or software. In case you have a full-house management system with hundreds of features on board, then mobile may really be optional for you, but you still need to consider the use cases of your customers and which device they use at what time.
Among many great product redesign ideas, consider this one: Everyone likes to have the product tailored to their preferences and to conveniently address users’ core needs. You could conduct a user survey or questionnaire. Based on the obtained results, you can discover what current users like and what they actually lack. Then, you can add this to your product. For example, this could include personalized recommendations, adaptable interfaces, or even customizable themes and layouts.
At Linkup Studio, we have worked on and continue to collaborate with various products on product redesign services. We aim to provide fresh product redesign ideas to help you transform your digital solution for the better. Specifically, we've tackled several products that needed a redesign:
Despite Reverso’s robust functionality and strong foundation, there were some issues with the product’s architecture, UX, and an outdated interface across the entire ecosystem. The existing designs lacked scalability for new features and offered limited room for enhancements.
That’s why our team delivered a comprehensive product redesign. We examined over 150 screens from the previous application version, identified bottlenecks, and determined some usability flaws. Then, we proposed design changes that have significantly increased the company’s revenue.
Send us a line to get each detail of our work and deliverables for the key language translation platform from our case study article.
When our studio began our collaboration with Impactive, we found inconsistencies in the system, both in the internal admin area and the volunteer app. The admin section's functionality for managing campaigns and tracking performance was inconsistent. Similarly, the volunteer app had disjointed user flows that complicated access to key features. It was a major concern for a product of this scale.
Our designers' focus shifted from purely aesthetic enhancements to enhancing element consistency and streamlining usability in both the admin and user interfaces. Previously, the client's designers worked situationally, contributing to the system's complexity.
We introduced a design system with clear guidelines for elements like button sizes and content layout. This decision promoted cohesive architecture across the product. Learn more about our work with the Impactive in this article.
Our company motto states we strive to bring the results that matter. For this reason, we are always honest and transparent about our approach to product redesign for each of our clients. That's why we do in-depth research first to guarantee an effective result and meet customer expectations.
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