Laying the UX Foundation for Your Next Redesign

When you hear the phrase ‘website redesign,’ you’re likely to immediately think one of the following:

1. Will this take forever and cost a fortune?

2. My website is too large to tackle all at once.

3. You shudder at the memory of your last redesign experience.

Website redesigns are one of the largest user experience undertakings in the digital world. You are faced with a compounding list of critical decisions on a tight timeline that may impact your site for months or years to come. These decisions span from setting goals, to reviewing new designs and content, content management, usability, site build and where to host it…the list goes on.

The best way to avoid the headache of decision-making and internal politics over page layouts, and to make an investment in a new website that will give you ROI, is to lay a data-backed UX foundation. Rather than tackling an entire redesign at once, you can break it into manageable pieces - starting with creating your user experience framework for your next redesign.

Using Seer’s UX Framework As a Roadmap

Our Creative Services team has a four-step methodology for tackling any UX project or redesign. You should ask the following questions before making the leap into your redesign, as well as throughout the site redesign process.

Continue reading to learn more about each step, and why this framework is essential for any site redesign:

Step 1: Discovery

This is the stage for gathering insights - learn about your users’ needs, your content managers’ pain points, and what your leadership team expects performance-wise from a new site.

Dig in on how your competitors are addressing similar audiences to uncover where there is overlap in your experiences, or where there may be opportunities for your new site to gain a competitive advantage.

Collect any available data on your site to establish a baseline for what engagement and performance looks like on your site. Align on success metrics for your redesign.

Distill this information into the basis of your project brief. This will serve as your Rosetta Stone that translates insights into designs.

Ask:

• Who are we designing for?

• What do they want? What do they need?

• What are our business goals and KPIs for this redesign?

Step 2: Strategy

With your insights and project brief in-hand, it’s time to synthesize your information and ideate on a potential site redesign approach. Note that no visual design work is occurring at this stage - you’re laying the groundwork from which stronger design can take place.

At this stage, you may leverage opportunities, requirements, and data to inform user journey maps or empathy maps to gain a deeper understanding of the user experience from awareness to conversion on your current site. These maps can become part of your UX foundation to inform intentional changes of the various user journeys across your website.

Ask:

• How do our findings translate to problem statements and redesign requirements?

• How can we capitalize on opportunities?

• How might we address user pain points?

Step 3: User Experience Design

Now that you have a strong understanding of the goals for your site redesign and a strategy to address them, it’s time to generate low-fidelity wireframes to further solidify your UX foundation. Note that these are not design comps. It’s easy to get “lost in the sauce” of redesigns when you’re making decisions about UX and colors, typography, and imagery simultaneously.

You should consider your navigation and information architecture. Keeping your user journey maps top-of-mind, how can you structure your site to best support user needs and your business goals? At this stage, you may create initial wireframes, navigation layouts, and a content strategy.

Ask:

• How does our strategy translate to a digital experience?

• What design patterns should be considered?

Step 4: Validate

Before kicking off design, consider how you will test your redesigned site, validate any assumptions or hypotheses, and refine the UX as needed. 

By the time you reach this step, you should be confident in your redesign insights, requirements, and structure.

Ask:

• How do we minimize risk for implementation and launch?

• How can we stress test and improve upon our ideas?

• How will we validate our redesigned site by end users and stakeholders?

Go Forth and Design!

As you forge ahead into design execution, development, and launch, refer back to your project brief to ensure all design reviews and decision-making tie back to your UX needs.

Remember - a website redesign is a big undertaking. But by laying a strong UX foundation - gathering insights, developing a data-backed strategy and information architecture, and preemptively creating a post-launch testing plan - you will be empowered to make decisions more quickly and have the data in-hand to validate your choices.

Still unsure about your site redesign? Seer Interactive offers redesign services ranging from UX Research to UX Design, UI & Visual Design, and Content Creation. Shoot us a message to determine how we can best help out.

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