Revamp to Victory: A strategic approach to your product’s redesign

Redesigning any product can be the gateway to reducing long term costs, retaining more satisfied users and if it’s done well, can cut down development time, costs and streamline the very processes that have been a thorn in the side of your team for years - while at the same time boosting team morale throughout to craft a more collaborative and invested work force.

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Getting it wrong though, can lead to truly devastating results. The all important App Store review can instantly take a hit - much like Snapchat’s took in 2018. While some subsequent problems can be absorbed by the larger companies, they can however be near fatal to new products trying to establish a foothold in a competitive market. One misstep could lead to the best marketing campaign your rival could ever ask for.

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This is why approaching such a crucial project with precision and care is essential, both to the survival of the product and the business.

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To help you navigate these choppy waters, we’ve put together a guide to take you one step closer to your winning transformation.

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Step 1 | Kick off / Existing Product Audit

This is a great opportunity to capture the initial thoughts within the team. Every scrap of feedback from each member is valuable and can be added to the list. Over time - this feedback will validate itself against other feedback with trends emerging. At this stage though is vital to allow everyone to drain their opinions and preconceptions of the product before move onto the Discovery phase.

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Step 2 | A Journey of Discovery

The discovery phase is really about starting to capture details about what other people think about your product, particularly two groups - your customer's and your hands on team.

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User interviews, targeted questionnaires or general surveys establishing how your customers interact with your product are essential. These can capture the existing opinions of people that use the product day-in and day-out and to be be blunt, they’re the ones that keep the lights on and the bottom line afloat.

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Utilising a combination of surveys with general ranging questions can help identify common threads or pain points. Interviews with particularly incitful participants can then really dig into the details. These nuggets of information are essential prep work. Done correctly they create a blueprint for the work ahead. Rushed or done poorly, they can leave the team directionless or going in the wrong way entirely.

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Often the most overlooked of the free resources of any redesign, are the people that know your product’s problems better than anyone else - your own team sitting at the coalface dealing with these daily challenges.

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Getting them involved early on is a great way to build moral and bring everyone together to feel they have their own part within the process. So cash in on this free, high value feedback from your operations team, marketing department, devs, designers or anyone else who support the product daily.

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There is a caveat to this though. Be mindful of internal politics that can slant opinions and drive teams to compete against others. Simply proofing this feedback alongside the customer’s though should filter out these issues.

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Additionally - the discovery phase is a good point to look around and see what else is going on in the market. Identify market disrupters, new emerging technologies that could benefit your product and obviously, check in an see what your rivals are doing as part of your competitor research.

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Step 3 | Create Your North Star

Simply put - take your findings from the previous two steps, use common threads and pain points to identify the end goal of the redesigned product. This should clearly identify the problems your solving and most importantly, how this will benefit your customer.

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Essentially it’s the same as creating a business statement for a company (only this will cost less, be used more and not be forgotten about in two months when the next rebrand starts) to check you’re going in the right direction and that every decision will take you there.

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For example, when reworking a calendar application - the north star could be to deliver a more intuitive application with a fully accessible UI, while also introducing new notification features and streamlining the create event flow that’s been the bane of our customer’s experience. So when Trev suggests branching out to create a new integrated email client and todo list within the calendar, it’s easy to check back and say - sorry Trev, that’s just not our goal at the moment.

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Step 4 | Ideate

The bread and butter of any redesign can now begin - actually redesigning the product.

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Lots of ideas can now be sifted through in an attempt to pull out a nugget of gold before they’re collectively whittled down to a handful with the most potential. This is useful because this point in the process explores all of the options available and when refined a handful can be presented to stakeholders.

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It’s essential for them to be guided through of the discovery phase though, identifying why decisions were taken, some avenues were explored but ultimately left out based on key insights.

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Again done well, your stakeholders will understand these choices and their feedback will be richer in value and allow you to save time and money. While if it’s done poorly - the conversation will go off path entirely and down rabbit hole after rabbit hole leading to more and more budget being assigned to additional design hours to explore these rabbit holes.

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Step 5 | User Feedback

Once a concept has been identified as the preferred option, we move onto one of the most important steps - user testing.

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User testing has the potential to not only save time and effort on a product redesign that isn’t right, but most importantly money as well.

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Ideally, user testing will involve a working prototype of the concept put in front of a carefully curated selection of users. How detailed this is will entirely depend on the skill and demand of the design team - but ideally it will be as close to the final product as possible built using Protopie, Figma or another specialist prototyping software.

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The value in allowing users to get their hands on the product now lies in identify pitfalls or unseen problems before any time or budget has been spent by the dev team. Instead the designs  or product can pivot with less impact on the business without it ever landing on the shadowy desk of a developer.

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User testing can also be used to settle any hotly debated subjects within the team. For example: Bill thinks the calendar should default to week view, while Ted thinks it should be Month view - well, ask your participants which makes sense to them. Now there’s a definitive outcome that’s no longer one person’s opinion vs another.

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Step 6 | Refine for launch

Driven by the insights gathered in your user feedback sessions, the product should now be able to undergo the final round of revisions before launch. By now these changes should only be  minor and time can be spent on the run up to the developer handover on finishing touches, such as animations, transitions and little interactions to deliver the much sought after moment of joy for the user when using your product. You’ll know the product is ready when you can check it with confidence against your project North Star and it’s ticking every box - and works!

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Lastly - although this as standard should be baked into the design process - it’s worth taking time to ensure the product is fully accessible, particularly with lawsuits against the inaccessible on the rise. For tips on how best to do this - check out our Empowering Product Teams: A Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting Accessible Products blog by our Senior UX designer Nicolle Moore.

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Step 7 | Development & Testing

Once in the capable hands of your development team, the product’s nearing the finish line. That said there’s still a lot that can go wrong. The need for the design and dev teams to collaborate to ensure the former’s vision is clearly communicated to the letter is essential. It’s not uncommon for bits to be watered down or skipped due to time constraints or misunderstandings - and as soon as these start creeping in they can drastically undermine the work that’s come before. Internal cross team testing is essential to deliver the final product the way it was intended.

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Step 8 | Launch!

It’s here, the moment everyone’s been waiting for.

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While all the work in the build up leading to this moment has been geared to delivering the perfect product - be prepared for something to either not be right or to find a bug on launch day. It’s inevitable and rarely any one person or team’s fault. Having a team ready to quickly address this is the last step in the process before moving onto V2.

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Beware the temptations

Throughout the process there’s going to be a tempting demon that’ll creep onto your shoulder. Sometimes it’ll be there of it’s own accord and other times it’ll appear because of stakeholder or time pressures. All the while it’ll be wanting you to cut corners.

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We don’t really need to do user testing do we? That can be a in the V2 or the classically demoralising line that doesn’t have to be in the MVP - despite every bit of research and work up until that point saying it very much does.

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Sacrificing any part of the process to save time or money will almost certainly resurface as a pain in the posterior later on. It could be in the form of a benign element that barely matters -  or it could be part of a vital element that will lose you users and money. It’s just not worth it.

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Similarly, beware the temptation of straying out of your lane with your product - offering or adding the latest buzzwordy technology just for the sake of it. Honestly by the end of 2024 I half expect AI coffee mugs or Christmas cards to be sold with integrated Chat GPT… oooh…now that is a good idea…

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In conclusion, the process of redesigning a product is a delicate and a crucial task that can bring about significant benefits if done correctly. By embracing this design led approach we’ve run through should dramatically reduce any missteps lay the first brick in the foundations of a your product redesign journey.