Don’t Redesign. Ever.

Have you ever gone through a botched eCom­merce redesign project that made you ful­ly recon­sid­er your entire life choic­es, with a grow­ing, unshak­able feel­ing that your life some­how just took a strange turn, bring­ing you to the verge of an epiphany as you yawp to the sky – fran­ti­cal­ly flail­ing arms in the air – that you don’t want to deal with what­ev­er-the-tech-web­sites-are ever again, and just unques­tion­ably need to aban­don mod­ern soci­ety for good, spend­ing your ana­logue days hunt­ing your own food in the mid­dle of the far­thest for­est, and your ana­logue nights fight­ing recur­ring night­mares of scope creep, missed dead­lines, blood-thirsty bud­get spread­sheets and sheer despair?

Yeah, me too.

Redesigns take a toll on all teams and are always risky. Let’s explore the most com­mon ones and sug­gest a bet­ter approach.

What’s in a project?

Let’s set some com­mon ground on what we’re talk­ing about. I’d define redesign as alter­ing the look and feel of mul­ti­ple sec­tions, com­po­nents and user expe­ri­ence pat­terns on a giv­en web­site at the same time.

Achiev­ing this takes a lot of work and mov­ing parts. Depend­ing on your team skills and size you might do this in-house, or through sin­gle or mul­ti­ple part­ners. A pret­ty stan­dard process would involve:

• Brand dis­cov­ery
• Cus­tomer jour­ney analysis
• Wire­fram­ing
• Mood­boards
• Pro­to­typ­ing
• Mul­ti­ple feed­back loops until design is approved
• Cod­ing, some­times even replat­form­ing
• Test­ing
• Deploy­ing
• Post-launch mar­ket­ing campaigns
• Per­for­mance control

That looks like a lot of stuff for what you real­ly want in the end, which is to make it bet­ter and sell more. And the more plates you have spin­ning, the more chances of things get­ting out of control. 

Hel­lo sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, we’ve been expect­ing you

The actu­al, visu­al redesign stage of the project is where the dan­ger lurks.

It makes sense, because a lot of opin­ions clash there. You get three mood­boards or ear­ly comps with dif­fer­ent approach­es, and it turns out that Mar­ket­ing loves ver­sion A, the founders are sold on B, and you want to push for C. The more stake­hold­ers are involved, the more it becomes an impos­si­ble design-by-com­mit­tee negotiation.

So you search for con­sen­sus. But con­sen­sus sucks. 

Team A wants piz­za. Team B burg­ers. We want to move this for­ward so we look for the mid­dle ground. The math­e­mat­i­cal mid­dle point that can swing the votes: The Piz­z­aburg­er. Con­verg­ing on a com­pro­mise that, because it tries to please every­one, ends up pleas­ing no one.

By the time we fin­ish deal­ing with this, we have bril­liant­ly accom­plished the hard­est task: to make every­one unhap­py. Hey, but at least we have an approved design and can move forward. 

Worst thing is that nobody real­ly cares. Or do they?

Awful­ly designed web­sites can sell a gazil­lion prod­ucts per minute. Ama­zon was the ugli­est web­site in the world for twen­ty years. I love design in gen­er­al (mad­ly), and dig­i­tal design in par­tic­u­lar. It’s been at the core of every­thing I’ve done for near­ly twen­ty years. So what’s the point?

The point is that we can look at this from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent angle.

Design is essen­tial. Beau­ty mat­ters. The prob­lem is not redesign­ing or not. 

It’s bit­ing off more than we can chew.

A bet­ter way: 10 steps to ditch redesigns for good

Avoid con­verg­ing eCom­merce redesign and replatform

It’s a recipe for dis­as­ter. Replat­forms have their unique set of chal­lenges around per­for­mance, SEO, data integri­ty and migra­tions, ERP inte­gra­tions, you name it. Put a high­ly opin­ion­at­ed redesign lay­er on top and you’ll be set­ting your­self up for trouble.

Adopt a growth-dri­ven design mindset

Instead of redesign­ing once every n years to catch up with tech, fea­tures, design, com­peti­tors and what­not, get every­one sold on a dif­fer­ent way of work­ing: redesign­ing just a lit­tle bit, all the time, forever. 

Key advan­tages:

• Your web­site will always feel fresh and evolv­ing for your customers
• You can nar­row down the chal­lenges, involve less peo­ple in the dis­cus­sion, and have more control
• Costs are much bet­ter han­dled and amortized
• Risks are dras­ti­cal­ly reduced

• Time to mar­ket is minimum

Keep things simple

Look, some­times you can’t avoid a full, ambi­tious eCom­merce redesign. We’ve had our fair share of projects where we had to revamp lega­cy web­sites with very ugly, out­dat­ed, inde­ci­pher­able visu­al archi­tec­tures. There will be cas­es when it’s eas­i­er (and plain log­i­cal) to throw the baby out and the bath­wa­ter. Just keep in mind to make sure the replace­ment is a min­i­mum viable web­site, the very basic expres­sion of what a func­tion­al improve­ment can look like. 

Once your new web­site is live, work­ing, and with no humans harmed dur­ing the process, you can begin the growth-dri­ven design journey. 

Make your wishlist

Have an ongo­ing, grow­ing list of new ideas. Don’t even eval­u­ate if these are good or bad. Just make sure you round up every­thing you stum­ble upon that looks like it could be inter­est­ing for your brand: your competitor’s new and flashy gallery style, that super easy bun­dle ​“buy the look” one click process you saw while shop­ping for the hol­i­days, a third par­ty plat­form that could solve ful­fill­ment issues and needs fur­ther research. 

Hav­ing this list forces you to pri­or­i­tize, find quick wins, plan your time to mar­ket and arrange experiments.

Not to blow our own trum­pet, but Agency Part­ners can be a great help. Teams out­side your orga­ni­za­tion bring fresh ideas that come from a very dif­fer­ent place, expe­ri­ence and skill sets.

Focus on what matters

As you go through the list, one mini-project at a time, keep a goal dri­ven, prag­mat­ic spirit.

Design is impor­tant, but met­rics are impor­tant-er. And many times they col­lide. What’s essen­tial is to under­stand that any change you make on your web­site should lead to an improve­ment in mean­ing­ful met­rics. Look for edges in ses­sion times, engage­ment, actu­al orders and con­ver­sions, aver­age tick­et val­ue, improve­ments in cus­tomer life­time val­ue, etc. 

Then, cre­ate your cal­en­dar of experiments

Make sure you split-test every­thing you can. Yes, that new head­er looks love­ly, but is it bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous one? Just run them both in par­al­lel and get objec­tive data.

This is of course bound, but not lim­it­ed to, con­ver­sion rate opti­miza­tion. Have a cal­en­dar to set up the exper­i­ments, fol­low up on the gath­ered data, and eval­u­ate the results. 

Lis­ten to what the data has to say

We’re big fans of hav­ing strong opin­ions loose­ly held. Go with that hunch that tells you to com­plete­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ize the prod­uct detail page. Test it against the cur­rent one. And then defend the data with fer­vor. Is the old lay­out bet­ter for the busi­ness? Just revert the changes. You were right and the new design rocks? Print ​“I told ya” t‑shirts for every­one and have a party.

Be play­ful

Again, nobody real­ly cares, so you can try bold changes in small dos­es and you can reverse changes if the data is look­ing thin. So be cre­ative, find unique­ness in your style and don’t just copy your competitor’s site. You can break things, get away with crazy ideas, and gen­er­ate hap­py acci­dents all the time.

Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is the hard­est chal­lenge in B2B and hav­ing the right cre­ative spir­it helps a lot.

Have a budget 

And defend it. I promise it’s bet­ter to con­tin­u­ous­ly improve the web­site in small chunks than to do a crazy major eCom­merce redesign every four years. It’s cheap­er, improves sales and reduces the team’s time investment. 

So make sure you have a decent bud­get to go through these improve­ments week after week with the right cadence and pre­dictable effort. 

Embrace your ground­hog day

Adopt­ing an iter­a­tive approach, or ​“growth-dri­ven” as we call it, is bet­ter on every front. Run it for a cou­ple years and you’ll find faster time to mar­ket, data-dri­ven deci­sion mak­ing, improve­ments in every KPI, and a more pre­dictable budget.

On the flip­side it means you have to accept a dif­fer­ent reality: 

Web­sites nev­er are, and nev­er will be, ​“fin­ished” or ​“redesigned”. The most bril­liant brands out there are the ones with a per­fect­ly syn­chro­nized team behind that’s try­ing out new ideas every day, chang­ing fast, gath­er­ing data and find­ing com­pet­i­tive edges.

And it’s more fun, and chal­leng­ing in health­i­er ways. 

That’s it. No more eCom­merce redesign. Try it out. I’m sure you’ll call me in three months, quot­ing Paul, to tell me we have to admit it’s get­ting bet­ter.