A how-to manual for website makeover with users in mind to enhance the experience is something that every business needs. Since you’re here, it’s likely that you’re in the midst of, or at the very least considering, a website redesign. Perhaps your website is looking obsolete and you believe it’s time for a change, or perhaps you want to rebuild the user experience to address a problem with sluggish traffic and declining conversions.
Whatever the reason, in our experience, a redesign can often resolve many issues, but if done incorrectly, it can also completely derail businesses. This manual is intended to assist you in doing a successful redesign.
Our basic tenet in this article is that the best, safest, and most efficient way to accomplish a website redesign is to approach it with customers in mind. We believe that what is good for customers is good for business. The 6 prerequisites for a customer-centric redesign are covered in this article.
It walks you through a step-by-step research framework to help you gather the customer-centric insight you need and concludes with some dos, don’ts, and advice about website redesign we learned from our experience and that of other UX, web design, and development experts.
What is a website redesign?
A website redesign is a major revamp that modifies your present website’s code, content, structure, and graphics dramatically in order to better serve your visitors. A great website redesign typically increases sales, decreases bounce rates, and enhances user experience (UX).
The 6 things you must know to upgrade your website redesign process
1. Identify the most valuable pages on your website
Consider the process of redesigning a website like you would a home. If you were starting a remodel, you wouldn’t just start slamming walls down and swinging your hammer around without first making sure they were load-bearing. Similarly, before beginning a redesign, you should have a clear picture of your website’s ecology, examine your wireframes, and understand which pages should be treated carefully and which can be completely scrapped and rebuilt.
High conversion, high traffic pages
These are the most important pages for your company: You must approach them cautiously and with 10 times more attention than you would with anything else you plan to revamp on your website because any errors you make here could have terrible effects.
High conversion, low traffic pages
Even though they don’t already receive a lot of traffic, these pages are crucial because of the conversions they generate, so you must be cautious when redesigning them to avoid destroying anything that is already effective.
High traffic, low conversion pages
These pages receive a lot of traffic, however, there is a conversion problem. Redesign with the goal of improvement: You can be more experimental with these than in the other two categories because your tweaks won’t put conversions at risk.
Low traffic, low conversion pages
Due to the minimal traffic, modifications to these pages are probably not going to be noticed, and you aren’t risking conversions anyhow. These are the pages on your website that are least likely to need redesigning.
This is important because the best results from your website redesign will come from knowing which pages must be preserved and treated carefully, ensuring that you don’t ruin anything that is functioning and doesn’t hurt conversions.
2. Identify your website’s visitors and their motivations
One of the most frequently ignored aspects of a website redesign is determining your most valuable pages. But identifying the key pages is only half the battle; you also need to understand who is looking at them and why.
I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, and I want to purchase are the four main aim categories that lead consumers to a website.
According to this framework, website users could arrive at your page for below-mentioned reasons-
1. Out of curiosity regarding your company or items
2. I’d want to contact you
3. Need guidance on how to use one of your goods
4. Are prepared to purchase a product from you
These are all very varied reasons for visiting a website, so understanding the intention or “driver” that brought them there is essential when redesigning with your customers in mind. Making customer personas—semi-fictional representations of your current and ideal customers—based on actual demographic and psychographic data is one approach to do this.
Personas make it clearer for you to identify who your ideal clients are and when they visit particular pages on your website, what is their primary motivation or “driver”?
Persona information enables you to clearly define the audience for your redesign and to keep that audience’s demands and motivations in mind while you make design choices.
3. Understand what drives or deters your customers
It’s a good place to start for a website redesign to know which pages are the most valuable and who is visiting them (and why), but this information alone won’t guarantee success. There are now two major information gaps: what persuades/assists customers in completing the tasks they came to take, and what hinders them along the road. Consider these as the “hooks” and “barriers” your customers encounter on the website.
Examining barriers and hooks will assist you in developing a firm understanding of:
1. When people endure problems and become stranded
2. What is and isn’t working on individual pages
3. What individuals think is good or bad about the overall experience
4. Whether or whether your present CTAs are effective
5. Whether experiences vary across desktop and mobile devices
6. What is practically preventing people from converting
7. What’s causing uncertainty and annoyance
Understanding this is crucial else you won’t know what to keep, what to remove, or what to rethink if you are unable to make the connection between customer behavior and the performance of your website and are unable to distinguish between elements that work and don’t. As a result, you risk replicating many of the current issues in the new design.
4. Understand how to use KPIs to measure success (KPIs)
Metrics connected to your bottom line are the most precise approach to determine whether your improvements were successful if you run an online-only firm. They get right to the point by asking if your makeover was successful for the company.
Revenue-related KPIs are directly tied to the goal of your redesign, which was to build a website that your target customers will love and use to make purchases. They consist of –
1. Quantity of conversions
2. Rate of conversion
3. Revenue
4. Average Order Value (AOV)
5. Client Lifetime Value (CLV)
In order to assess the effectiveness of your redesign, you can also employ qualitative metrics. For instance:
1. Has the volume of support tickets/questions decreased since the redesign?
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
This is crucial because, without precise KPIs, you won’t be able to assess whether and by how much your website makeover was effective.
5. Understand what needs to change and how to test it.
You’ve completed your research, established your KPIs, and are prepared to begin the redesign. You could be tempted to give your website a complete makeover all at once, but concentrating on the little things that might make a big difference first, making tweaks, and observing the effects is a safer and more effective approach.
If you have enough traffic to produce statistically meaningful results, A/B testing is frequently a wise choice. Simply assess the impact of one of your new elements on your site’s objective in comparison to the existing site. For example, you could:
1. Check to see if the video on your homepage, which previous clients have expressed a preference for, maybe positioned above the fold. If that succeeds,
2. Test whether the presence of social proof affects conversions on your checkout page. If it does,
3. Proceed with another modification
But there are other ways to test the efficacy of a few website designs if you don’t have enough traffic or an A/B testing tool set up. For instance, you might think about conducting moderated usability testing sessions, both in-person and remotely, where you show your new page(s) to real people, get them to interact with it, and ask questions about their experience and any difficulties they’re running into.
This is crucial because your traffic and conversions are most likely concentrated on a small number of landing pages. None of them should be broken, please. Take the research’s most significant concept, test it, and then implement it if necessary before moving on to the next.
Conclusion
Customer preferences, browser technologies, design principles, and accessibility guidelines are all constantly evolving. Additionally, elements that were functional at the time of the redesign might not be functional in a year. Since they are the ones for whom you are developing the website, you will need to keep track of what they want and need.
Thankfully, Tentackles provides the most imaginative user experience design services with an emphasis on increasing brand value through creative insight. Connect with us today to attract new clients and offer a fantastic user experience.
