PART 1:

Lately, we've had a flurry of clients contacting us about their latest redesign project, wanting to know what advice we can give them. We talk to them, discussing their team's needs and what is driving the redesign effort.

In many cases, we discover the team is thinking only in the short term. Of course, because they have immediate deadlines and resources to manage, they need to focus on what's happening right now. The short term, after all, is where we all live day-to-day.

We've spent the last five years studying teams involved in major redesign efforts. Some teams regularly produce innovative, user-satisfying enhancements to their sites. Other teams work hard, but their efforts result in expensive changes that, after all is said and done, don't really enhance the user's experience or help the business.

As we analyze the difference between these two types of teams, we've noticed a pattern: teams who focus on the long term are far more likely to create designs that really pay off for the organization. Short-term thinking gets the design done, but the team ends up doing it all over again months down the road. Long-term thinking deals with the inevitability of changes and turns the site into a living, breathing entity that grows with the organization's needs.

In our research, we've uncovered seven essential long-term components to reach a successful redesign project.

1. Make Sure You Have A Vision

We suggest clients look five or ten years into the future and ask the question, "What will using our site be like on that date? What experience will the user have?" Team members from the best organizations can answer this question. They have a consistent, clear idea what the user's experience will be like in the future. Having a clear vision lets the team chart a direction for their design, helping identify if any design idea is moving them closer to the vision or farther away.

It's critical the vision not focus on future technology but instead on future experience. What are the steps in today's process that makes things cumbersome or frustrating? How could the experience become more delightful?

One of our financial services clients constructed a vision where banking clients easily manage all their money and credit from a single screen, or can simply check their financial forecast from their mobile phone when, say, deciding if they can afford that new car, while simultaneously getting competitive quotes for insurance and car loans from their primary institution. While it would be impossible to do this with today's legacy infrastructure, it's possible to see something like this 10 years from now. The design team, using this vision, can then work in baby steps to getting as close to it today as the technology will allow. As the technology improves, they can get even closer.

2. Spend Time With Your Users

To successfully redesign, you need to know who is using your site and what they are doing with it. You need to know what is currently working well and what is broken.

The number of established web sites embarking on a major redesign, whose designers have never watched any users actually work with their current design, constantly surprises us. Add that to the number of relaunched sites we see where the designers are surprised by the negative reaction of their users. What you get is a group of organizations that need to spend more time with their users.

When preparing for a redesign of their site, many teams have no trouble spending hours in meetings to talk about what the new design should do. Our recommendation is those teams make sure they spend the same amount of time sitting with users watching them work with the existing design. Teams that do this produce substantially better results.

Continue to Part 2
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Jared M. Spool
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