Unlocking Growth: 14 Reasons to Redesign Your SaaS Digital Experience
Welcome to the redesign, a powerful growth tactic in your Experience-Led Growth strategy.
Hey, Michael here. Welcome to the free edition of the Exponential Growth Newsletter.
I write about Product Growth and Experience Design.
The product life cycle is turbulent for startups, which constantly rush for growth and don’t have time to worry about design or even have a designer on board. Deliver fast, get feedback, fix, and repeat; there is no time for beauties. It's an entirely normal situation. Right, first things first.
However, people tend to judge things first by appearance but later value them for their substance and functionality. According to Toptal, 94% of the first user impressions are design-related. It is not always about the digital product itself; it relates to any major touchpoint on the customer journey, such as a website, a landing page, or even the design of an email template, and so on.
Radiant diamonds aren't found lying on the ground; they are diligently sought, carefully cut, and skillfully polished to reveal their brilliance. The same applies to any digital product. Sooner or later, it becomes necessary to frame and polish it. We call this redesigning or introducing a new user experience.
But why should you consider redesigning your digital experience?
Redesigning your application or entire customer journey is an important decision that carries both opportunity and risk. Whether you want to improve user experience, refresh your brand identity, or stay ahead of technological progress, a redesign can breathe new life into your product experience.
Redesigning is a powerful growth tactic and one of the most effective tools in an Experience-Led Growth strategy.
Based on my experience, I’ve brought together 14 compelling reasons why you should consider redesigning your product. So, let's explore why a fresh coat of digital paint might be your next best move.
1. Customer feedback
Delivering value to customers is the core of any business. Customers know better what, why, and how they want to use your products or services; at least, they think so. You get a lot of feedback daily through interviews, demos, surveys, and support requests, so at some point, you need to incorporate it into your product.
Sometimes, it’s easy, but usually, the more feedback you receive, the more painful it gets to add new features over time. They don’t fit into your current design system, and new additions break user workflow and the integrity of the user interface, and so on.
Eventually, the development team needs more time to implement new features, which often involves refactoring or completely rewriting the application. This slows everything down and requires a lot of resources. That’s not how successful companies work.
So, if adding new features becomes a nightmare, and your application gets cluttered and unusable with even a small change, it’s time to consider redesigning it.
2. Data and metrics
Data is a gold mine of product growth. Since the user interface (apps, websites, forms, etc.) is at your business's frontlines, the design directly impacts the product performance and usability metrics. Many product-related issues can be traced back to design shortcomings. These challenges include a terrible first impression, challenging onboarding, poor user experience, and visual appeal.
Data-driven design assumes making decisions based on hard data rather than lore, beliefs, or personal preferences. To improve your key product metrics and overall usability, you should consider redesigning the experience as a viable solution for problematic areas.
The best user experience (UX) and a straightforward customer journey are essential elements that eventually lead to better conversion and retention, happy customers, and a thriving business.
3. Eliminating the feature creep
Feature creep occurs when a user interface is overloaded, messy, noisy, cluttered, and has poor usability. Typically, it happens when the product team continuously adds redundant features until the product becomes too complicated to use and eventually loses value for the customer.
At this point, you stop getting feedback, but a torrent of complaints instead. Of course, if users are still interested in your product, otherwise they churn.
Redesigning will introduce a new user experience, unclutter the user interface, prioritize features by relevance of use, improve usability, and, as a result, increase overall customer satisfaction.
4. Overcoming MVP trap
A typical scenario is when you’ve built a throwaway MVP to test the idea and prove it right. However, on the wave of success, the team continues building the product on top of the MVP by adding more features, but there are not enough resources and time to make it right.
Usually, there is a blowback in terms of poor usability, redundant complexity, slow development speed, and increased scaling costs. MVP is not intended to be a product; it’s just another experiment.
But if you have already built a product based on your MVP and see that it doesn’t work well in terms of usability, consider redesigning it.
5. Building the Information Architecture
Information architecture (IA) refers to the organization of the content in relation to the available functionality in your application. One example of IA is a sitemap, which is a structured way to show how webpages are categorized, grouped, and organized on the website.
Well-organized content creates value and credibility for the end user, so whenever they visit your website, everything is located in the right place under the proper categories.
Often, designers simply ignore or don’t pay enough attention to the IA, jumping straight ahead to building the navigation without understanding the broader scope. This may lead to ad hoc content organization and confusing navigation, which I’ll discuss next.
6. Improving navigation
Navigation is a set of guidelines that help users interact with your digital experience. It is a part of IA and represents user interface components that assist the user in finding content or a feature that leads to the desired action. Without good navigation, your users will get lost or be confused using your app.
The navigation should be built considering many aspects, such as industry-accepted UX patterns, user preferences, and behavioral patterns. It should be tailored to a specific goal that the user must accomplish in your product to experience its core value.
7. Outdated design
Design trends are changing for a reason; they are not just a tribute to fashion. They respond to today's challenges and insights, market conjunction, user and industry demand, best practices, and more.
Modern design systems, like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design, are not just a set of nice buttons; they are designed through an in-depth analysis of user interactions with digital products.
A good design is a harmony of beauty and functionality, where visual appeal marries the joy of use.
Updating outdated visual design and UX patterns is essential to keep up with modern trends. This promotes product growth, ensures it remains relevant, and meets evolving user expectations.
8. “Aha moment” optimization
The moment when the customer realizes the product's true value is known as the “Aha moment.” It sparks a shift in user perception that turns the product from an option into a “must-have” tool.
Another important concept in the customer journey is "Time-to-Value,” which is the period between the initial interaction with your product and the moment of realization of its core value. The shorter the time, the more likely the user will eventually convert.
However, users may find value in places you didn't expect or use the product in ways you didn't originally design it for.
Redesigning helps to identify the "Aha moment" and streamline the user journey to it, decreasing the "Time-to-Value." A well-executed redesign ensures that users will be led to the desired outcome and quickly discover and appreciate the product's core value.
9. Customer onboarding
Customer onboarding is among the most underrated or often completely overlooked product success factors. Onboarding introduces new users to your product, helps them through their first steps, communicates the product’s value, educates them on how to use it, and eventually encourages product adoption.
A good onboarding leads the customer through their entire journey, increasing the likelihood that users will get value from the product and continue using it. Effective user onboarding reduces friction, prevents user drop-off, and maximizes user retention.
Product redesign aims to simplify and clarify critical actions, such as discovering the core value or making payments, thus improving conversion, adoption, and retention.
10. Reduce complexity
While complexity does not necessarily mean difficult to use, simplicity alone does not always guarantee product success.
Complexity is inevitable. It may come from building sophisticated software like CRM or innovation that introduces new usability patterns to which users are not used. Consider redesigning as a way to reduce a product's complexity.
By redesigning, you can rethink the importance and priority of the core features, eliminate redundant elements, and focus on what is most valuable to users.
A clear hierarchy of information minimizes cognitive overload and enhances usability, while consistent design patterns throughout the application ensure the integrity of the user interface. The redesign can improve visual clarity using clear typography, appropriate color schemes, and consistent iconography.
In essence, the redesign is an excellent opportunity to address and mitigate the complexity of your digital experience.
11. Vision and brand alignment
A strong product brand should reflect the product's vision throughout its life cycle. The product vision is not static. It should remain responsive to emerging challenges and opportunities, shifts in customer preferences, market trends, competition, and the overall business environment.
Consider redesigning each time when you aim to marry the product design with a new vision, the updated brand identity, positioning, or messaging.
12. Pivoting
Another reason to redesign is changing the product concept or pivoting, in other words.
Pivoting is the adaptation process when a company realizes its existing offerings, strategies, or business models are misaligned with the market demands. It is a response to the insights gained from market analytics, customer feedback, or competitive analyses. Pivoting aims to reposition the business or product in the market to ensure growth.
Such drastic moves influence the value proposition, which leads to changes in the user experience, feature set, usability patterns, content presentation, product style, and user workflow. Thus, redesign is the next step after you have decided to pivot.
13. Strategic redesign
Strategic redesign assumes proactive measures in anticipation of or response to current or future challenges. These challenges may involve market expansion and adding new products, modules, or features.
To grow fast, you need to build a foundation that allows you to easily add new features or extensions later, change or adopt new technologies, address changes in legislation and compliance, merge different solutions into one offering, reduce costs, etc.
The goal of the strategic redesign is to redesign it now to save later; you will save not only money but also resources and time.
14. Scaling with the design system
Building a design system usually pops up when you want to scale up. The design system goes beyond traditional style guides and pattern libraries. It is a design framework that combines principles, reusable components, and standards that govern the visual and functional design of digital experience across various channels and devices. It provides clear guidelines and documentation on the appropriate use and implementation of UI elements.
The design system is a shared language that facilitates communication and efficiency among team members, speeds up the development process, and improves product quality.
It is no coincidence that the design system is the last on our list of reasons why your digital experience. Usually, the redesign process results in a long-lasting design foundation upon which your company's success is built.
Conclusion
As we wrap up this exploration, remember that redesign is a transformation journey. It’s about taking what works, fixing what doesn’t, and reimagining what your product can be. Digital experience redesigning is a growth tactic for creating a functional, usable, delightful digital product that inspires your customers.
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