It’s time for a redesign

Who doesn’t love redesigns? A chance to make things right, to put all the bad things behind and start over and better this time. Redesigns are like a breath of fresh air, a new sense of hope, better and greater things to come.

So how do we tackle a redesign? We start with the obvious, why? right? It all depends on who are we asking but these are very common to all of us: “It looks outdated; We need it to be responsive; We feel it’s time for a change;”. For me as a designer, it’s things like user journey pain points or user experience issues, numbers that should be better than they are, content that looks dumped on a page without consideration or the thing looks a mess and doesn’t make sense anymore.

We go to meetings with stakeholders and schedule some workshops to identify business needs and everyone is feeling confident and happy that finally things are going to be done the right way. I often feel that way.

After the discovery phase we already know what’s wrong. The website is outdated and needs to be accessible on all devices, the content needs strategy and consistent tone, the CMS needs to be upgraded as well as new information architecture. These are the obvious things but are not the biggest problem to be fixed.

The biggest problem is how companies work, the culture, the higher we go on the ladder, the less people seem to understand the importance of governance and team building, it’s all about making the people above happy.

I believe as designers we not only design the way people use things but we are also responsible to change business mindsets towards digital, towards the importance of doing things the right way and not in a way that makes the person above us satisfied with the looks of the website.

Redesigns are not only about making a thing do better but it is also a chance to make an organization work better as a team and less about pleasing the elephant in the room.