Please Stop Saying “Redesign”
Following up on my previous post about incrementalism, I would like to share this with you: we are trying to kill the word “redesign” at Cheezburger.
There is no such thing as redesign; there is only adding new things and cleaning up things that already exist. When you do lots of those activities your site might start to look as though it has a new design, but that’s something entirely different than a “redesign”.
In my experience, redesigns are typically championed by loud voices who think something “really sucks”, but they rarely have data…just a lot of opinions about how things could be better.
On the other hand, incrementalism forces focus on the actual needs of your users. You will never have a user that says, “Please redesign your navigation so that it better reflects your brand.” Never. What a user will say is, “I can never seem to find the widgamacallit page and that’s frustrating.”
When you’re focused on fixing the widgamacallit problem, then you can make changes that address that problem, and measure the improvement. You can ask the users, “Can you find the widgamacallit now?”
As a result, an incremental approach makes it easier to sniff out the B.S. When someone says, “Add the widgamacallit to the navigation,” there’s a logical answer: because it will help the user find it. But, when someone says, “Well, I think we should also add the glibiddygab to the navigation,” the answer is “Why?”
Very good recommendations. Incrementalism is a way of life at Estately – we remember that it’s a bad idea the hard way every few months.
Galen
10 Nov 09 at 1:09 pm
[...] comments I was so amped after yesterday’s post about redesigns, that I decided to write another. So, here’s two more reasons why I want web site redesigns [...]
Two More Reasons Why Redesigns Suck at Scott Porad
11 Nov 09 at 8:08 am
I don’t think your objection is with redesigns– I think it’s with people who aren’t designing with a specific outcome in mind and people who aren’t data-centric.
Your current design is your foundation and you can choose to build on it or (in dramatic situations) scrap it.
In your case, cheezburger has an excellent foundation– a redesign for you should be out of the question. If someone else has a foundation that was built an a bunch of assumptions that have proven to be faulty, you can choose to iterate your way to something or you can punt.
Like all religions, incrementalism has a LOT to offer but you shouldn’t be dogmatic about it. Just keep focusing on chasing outcomes rather than gratuitousness redesigns (big or small) and you’re on the right track.
By way of an example: We did a complete redesign of our “brochureware” site (for lots of reasons I won’t go into– but they boiled down to poor conversion performance). New redesign is converting 400% better. The whole process took about 2 weeks. Could I have iterated to a 400% improvement? Maybe, but I bet it woulda taken longer than 2 weeks.
Tony Wright
11 Nov 09 at 9:14 am
Tony,
Thanks for the comment. Now, for the benefit of our readers, would outline and/or explain the process that you used to redesign yourself to a 400% improvement?
Most redesigns, in my experience, result in the opposite, so we all stand to learn from your experience.
Scott
scottporad
11 Nov 09 at 9:17 am
Sure (I think this is a really interesting topic, by the way)… It’s a big topic, but I’ll try to get some of our thinking across. I think a fair bit of it was “lucky flailing by a group of fairly smart guys”. I think you’re right that most redesigns fail (but most aren’t outcome driven, as you say).
A redesign doesn’t have to be just pixel slinging. If the data shows that you suck, you might have to change who you’re talking to and how you talk about your product. In this case, we were ONLY doing a reboot on the brochureware site (about 25 pages at the time)– the app was largely untouched.
Goal of the redesign was higher conversions to paying accounts. Our current conversion rate was pretty weak and as a not-yet-profitable SaaS business, we needed to change our velocity or face death at the end of our runway (rather than takeoff, which is what we’re currently heading for!).
We had piles of data showing our conversion was weak. We got tons of traffic/PR and talked to lots of SaaS providers about their conversion rates. So we cooked up some theories about things that’d dramatically change our conversions (based on data from smart people we talked to and stuff that we read).
Theories (some backed with data, but not all of it was OUR data!):
- Our site was too deep and too businessy. We were positioning ourselves as an enterprise-ready solution too early– our best and most passionate customers were businesses that were 1-5 people. We should change our site to speak directly to our bread and butter.
- Our stickiest customers were using our productivity-enhancing features. We should focus less on being a time tracking solution and more on saving people time. We were saying too much.
- Social proof is huge (there’s a great book called Yes that has a great chapter on this – http://www.amazon.com/Yes-Scientifically-Proven-Ways-Persuasive/dp/1416576142/)... Our whole site should focus more on the fact that lots of people are using and loving RescueTime
- We organized our site by products when we should organize it by who you are (pbworks.com does a great job of verticalizing– we started with bascically saying “are you an individual? Business? Enterprise? School?”)
- Video! RescueTime is a weird enough idea that words and a few screenshots might not be communicating what we did. We talked to a lot of sites that saw a lift in conversion with screencasts, so we figured that was worth a shot.
Speaking from the designers corner, I can say that big redesigns are gratifying and empowering (which is dangerous!). But at the end of the day (with a bunch of data), it boiled down to our ability to say:
“Armed with what we know about our customers/market today, we now believe that a lot of the decisions we made about our brochureware site were wrong. Moving forward, we believe that the current site is more of an impediment than an asset, so we choose to be unencumbered by it.”
Best analogy of startups I’ve ever heard was that it’s like someone staggering down a dark alley looking for hidden lightswitches. Cheezburger has certainly graduated to the point where you can carefully walk down the (increasingly well-lit) alley and carefully inspect for more switches– you’ve got TONS of data and a great foundation. Our app is increasingly solid and beloved by our customers (as evidenced by our retention data), but with our brochureware site, we felt some drunken staggering was in order.
To sum up, my rule is this: If it’s GOOD, iterate to great (small/careful experiments). If it’s great, keep iterating (diminishing returns?) but maybe consider expanding your offering to get to more people. If it SUCKS, be honest with yourself about it and pivot HARD (use what you have, but don’t be encumbered by it). If you can do it based on data and careful thought, all the better. Thankfully, we only had a small chunk of our business that needed a reboot and (more thankfully!) it worked out for the better!
Tony Wright
11 Nov 09 at 10:15 am
[...] is a direct hat tip and thank you to Scott Porad’s recent posts on killing the word “redesign” and the follow up. Here are the take home points from each: There is no such thing as redesign; [...]
realidealist.net | Good Enough Works Most of the Time
11 Nov 09 at 10:35 am
[...] changes that we can measure and verify because the likelihood of our success is low. Although one commenter on a previous post indicated that his redesign vastly improved site performance, according to a broad collection of [...]
More on Redesigns: Only 30% of Web Site Changes Have a Positive Impact at Scott Porad
12 Nov 09 at 8:49 am
[...] is a direct hat tip and thank you to Scott Porad’s recent posts on killing the word “redesign” and the follow up. Here are the take home points from each: There is no such thing as redesign; [...]
Good Enough Works Most of the Time « realidealist.net
23 Apr 10 at 3:02 pm