How to redesign your website
Your users - if they are like most others - hate change. So how do you balance the need to stay with a familiar design interface and yet update your site to best reflect your marketplace offering?
First, let's get some terminology straight.
Graphic design refers to the way the site looks. It includes the graphical elements included in a website such as typography, colours and images.
User interface (UI) design refers to the way users navigate through your website and interact with its features. Think of the places where a user might click their mouse or look for particular information.
Many B2B marketers get the two confused and it can make a big difference to the effectiveness of your website which we know is usually the first point of contact a prospect has with your business.
Users hate change, particularly user interface change. On the other hand, sites whose interface has remained fairly static for a few years is probably groaning under it's own weight and a total graphic and user interface redesign is attractive.
Incremental change is usually the best option, but it is also the most problematic.
We'll often hear clients say "We need a fresh new look for our website." This is our first signal to dig deeper. The feeling can have one or a number of causes.
• The client believes their site isn't graphically attractive to clients
• The client believes the site content is inadequate or out of date
• The business has changed strategic direction and the website should reflect that change
• The client is bored with looking at their own site
• The client perceives they are being left behind by their competitors
You can see how easy it would be to miss the intent behind the client's request. If not investigated properly and the reasons for making change are not well understood, the redesign project gets off on the wrong foot, with the wrong goals and strategy. It's a bad place to be.
Speaking of the user interface design, usability guru Jakob Nielsen says that "Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it's new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users' existing knowledge of how a system works."
You stare at your website all day ... often for years on end. Of course you think it looks tired. Total up the number of hours you are exposed to your website or intranet. If you've had the same design for a few years, those hours likely reach into the thousands.
On the other hand, your typical user has probably spent only a few hours looking at your design over the last few years. Users spend most of their time on other sites.
People usually spend no more than 2-3 minutes on a website, so even if they visit your site daily, they'd run up only 30 exposure hours over two years ... but it's usually far less with even loyal customers spending less than five hours on your site each year. With so little time spent looking at the graphic design, customers won't tire of it anytime soon.
Users don't care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. When people are visiting websites, they don't spend their time analysing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.
Users love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.
Frequently Used UIs
If you run an intranet, or have a site often used for complex data input (think banking, online ordering or school Student Management Systems), users might in fact accumulate more than a few minutes' exposure to your UI per week. In such cases, you'd think that customers would clamour for a fresh design - but according to Nielsen, the answer is no.
"People who regularly use an interface become experienced users and their user experience is dominated by skilled performance. Designing for novice users vs. expert users differs in the relative importance of key usability attributes such as learnability and efficiency," he says.
"The more that people rely on skilled performance, the more they depend on having routine behaviors automated. Thus, high-frequency users also prefer a familiar design."
When To Refresh Designs Anyway
When do you refresh designs anyway? Generally, it's best to evolve a user interface with gentle changes rather than offer a totally fresh design. Neilsen strongly recommends getting the basic design right in the first place, before launching, so that it can live for several years with minor updates.
This approach contrasts with that of simply "throwing something at the wall" to see what sticks. Indeed, some people advocate just releasing your best guess, because the beauty of the Web is that you can always change it if you're wrong. This is true, but you'll be unpopular, because
• you'll be mistreating users by subjecting them to a flawed design that you could have fixed with just a few days of pre-release user testing; and
• you'll antagonise users by making them suffer the very changes that we know they hate.
In general, get it right, and then change slowly. Still, there are two cases in which a more radical approach is appropriate:
• If you have almost no current users and expect a major design improvement to dramatically expand the user base. In this case, the business loss from punishing your current customers is small enough to be worth taking.
• If your old design has incrementally evolved for so many years that the overall user experience has become overly convoluted and lost any sense of a unified conceptual structure.
So, unless your existing design is an overgrown mess of bolted-on features that needs a new architecture, it's best to stay with the familiar design that users prefer and avoid the temptation to go with a novel design that only you'll appreciate.
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