4 Tell-tale signs you need a product redesign (Part 1)

Your app has got to change with the times, or else. Or else, the competitors and the users certainly will. While you should always be on the lookout for improvements, I’ve compiled 8 tell-tale signs that a redesign is due. For part one, let’s do the first four. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Dated design

Does the design below look attractive? – No? You don’t have to be a designer to see that. That’s because most modern-day users can tell apart an attractive design from a dated one.

Designs that are a couple of decades old automatically elicit distrust among users, that won’t get into your app far enough to evaluate its usability and utility.

Underperforming metrics

Above anything, building a digital product is a business. As such, there are a number of metrics that indicate its health. Just to name a few: revenue, conversion, retention, etc. Although depending on your product, there’s a large variety of things you could track, we recommend prioritizing a single North Star metric.

How do you know whether your metrics are underperforming??– You compare with your past data and the general industry benchmarks. You can get an idea of your competitors’ performance through industry reports.

If you don’t like how your metrics compare to those of your competitors, you need to take action. If your product functions as intended (w/o technical errors), the likeliest cause of bad behavioral metrics is bad UX.

Pivots

Nailing everything about your product on the first attempt is tough. Business climate changes, you constantly receive new data and uncover new product opportunities. Being responsive to these internal and external changes is what pivoting is. Depending on how drastic these changes are, pivoting also entails redesigning a fair amount, if not all, of your app.

Rebranding

If rebranding is the only thing you’re after then you’d mostly have to deal with updating the user interface and microcopy. Rebranding generally does not involve any structural changes in user flows, so it’s probably the least daunting redesign out of the ones we’ve discussed so far.

What’s next

If any of these ring a bell, my best advice is to get a designer’s help. Fluking a redesign is a horrible idea. You can easily wind up with results worse than you had.

If you’re not sure what product design help you would need, I have an article on that here.

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