Avoiding Redesigns Brian ... Usability tools podcast, episode 12, avoiding redesigns. Christiansen: Recorded at the studios of User Interface Engineering, November 20th, 2007. [music] Brian: Welcome, I'm Brian Christiansen, producer of UIE podcasts. Each week we'll be sharing tools for improving your site's user experience, based on our research at User Interface Engineering. If you're interested in the topics we discuss in the podcast, sign up for our popular, free newsletter, UIE tips. I'll have more details on how at the end of the podcast. Now, this week's episode. [music] Brian: Hello again, this is Brian Christiansen, the producer of UIE podcast, here with Jared Spool, the founding principal of UIE. Hello, Jared. Jared Spool: Hey, Brian. Brian: So we're going to sit down today and talk about avoiding major redesigns. Now, being from a kind of visual background, the idea of a redesign is something that kind of gets me excited. Ooh, we can really reshape this site. I think a lot of designers get excited about, we can start over, we've seen how this has worked, but we can do it better. And we have clients here at UIE all the time telling us they're getting ready for their next major redesign of the site, they're going to overhaul everything. This is the right thing to do, right? Jared: No. No, it's a horrible, horrible idea. Brian: You're crushing me. Why is that? Jared: Well, the problem is that when you do a redesign, you run into a whole bunch of things. First, it eats up all your resources for a really long time. You have to take care of every little detail of the site and you have to walk through the entire thing, right? Because of that, you've got a tremendous amount of resources dedicated to this task, they can't really do anything else. You can't make tweaks to other parts, you can't be responsive to the rest of the system. Then when you're done, you roll this thing out, and the odds of something going horribly, horribly wrong are just immense. We had a client, a big box retailer, who spent a $100 million on a redesign. OK, I'm not exaggerating here, that's what they spent, $100 million dollars on a redesign. The day they launched, they saw a 20% reduction in sales, and it took them three and a half years to recover from that. I mean, think of what they could have gotten if they'd only spent $50 million. Brian: So a company that has the kind of resources to spend that much money on a design, you'd think they'd be able to hire the smartest, most amazing designers they can get their hands on. Jared: Oh, they did, they did. They hired really bright people. This is not a fact of just you have to hire the right people, it's the fact that you don't have enough information coming in during the design process. So all the decisions that you end up making are internally based decisions. They're not based on what people are really using the site for at all. And yeah, you can go do some usability testing, you can go do some initial research, but you can't possibly get all the information you're going to need to get in that process. And as a result, you end up making tons of changes that are just based on assumptions that are based on assumptions that are based on assumptions. And when it comes out, you're stuck. We have seen way too many dramatic failures about this. And the thing is that none of the big players do redesigns. Brian: Well, you have to redesign at some point, right? We're not looking at 600 pixel wide web sites anymore. You shouldn't be doing this? What are you saying? Jared: No. When was the last time Amazon redesigned the entire site? Never, right? Yahoo? Never. Now, Yahoo has redesigned pieces. They just came out with a new version of their chart capabilities for finance and they have a new version of Yahoo Mail. And about sometime last year, they came out with a new home page. Right? So they're doing it in small pieces. They're not doing the whole site, they're just doing piece by piece by piece. Netflix comes out with a new version of their site every two weeks, but it's not a redesign. It's just a little tweak here, a little tweak there. And if you go back and you compare Netflix over the last five years, you'll see that the pages today actually look radically different from the pages before, but they're changed in very small pieces. It's the old boiling of the frog. The best way to cook a frog, if you put them in a pot of boiling water, they just jump right out. So what do you have to do? You have to put them in a pot of cold water and then you slowly turn up the heat, right? And they don't move. It's the same thing sort of thing with redesigning, you can't do it all at once. If you do it all at once, it just gets away from you. Brian: I don't eat frogs. Jared: You don't eat frogs? Man, tastes like chicken. Brian: Of course, what else? So there's been talk recently about some larger sites, they've been redesigning. And one of the major reasons they do this is because they're moving to a new content management system. They've got new technology, they've been held back. Now they want to sprint forward with this new technology. Surely they've got to redesign in that instance? Or no? Jared: The whole idea behind redesign is that you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can do some small piece of it. Here's the deal, when you redesign everything all at once, you've got all these stakeholders from all over the organization who are going to want a say on this, OK? You've got all these different personas that you have to now design for, because there's all different people who use the site. You've got not only your customers, and there's probably six or seven different personas of customers, but maybe you have a portion of your site that's for vendors. You have a portion of your site that's for investors. You have a portion of the site that's for employees. So you've got all these different personas that you have to take into account and you're trying to juggle all this in your head. When problems crop up, because it's a redesign, it's... Jared: You have a portion of your site that's for vendors. You have a portion of the site that's for investors. You have a portion of the site that's for employees. So you've got all these different personas that you have to take into account and you're trying to juggle all of this in your head. Right? When problems crop up, because it's a redesign, it's visible all over the site. If the navigation breaks, it breaks everywhere. So you've got this huge visibility that you can see and on top of that, it's harder to rollback. If you only design a small piece, if Yahoo comes out with a new version of their charting software for their financials, so it charts all the stocks, and it doesn't work very well, they can just put the old one back. It's not a big deal. But when you do a whole redesign, it's really hard to put the old one back. So the risks are there, the rollback opportunities, the way to cover your butt in case it doesn't go right, all of that fails you. So now you've got some new piece of technology. You've decided OK, we're going to put in this new content management system, right? There's nothing that says you have to do it across the entire site at the same time. Take one piece of the site. So let's say you're a news site, and you've got news and sports and business news and local news, just pick one. Pick sports, for example. Just put it into sports. Or maybe just even pick a piece of sports. Just put in the new content management system for hockey. Just do it for the hockey news. See what happens. Chances are you've only got a handful of people who are dealing with hockey news, so you've only got a handful of people who are going to be interacting on the publishing side. Only a handful of stakeholders are going to care about this. Hockey news readers are a subset of your entire audience, so you've only got a handful of personas you're dealing with. Because hockey is a sport that apparently can go missing for years and nobody seems to care, if something goes terribly wrong, it's probably not that hard to put the old thing back. So you've got that capability. Oh, and it will take you shorter. Just redesigning the hockey news portion of the site isn't going to take you very long. What's it going to take you, a few weeks, maybe a month, right? You get that in, you get it working the way you want, you put it out. Maybe you send it out to some beta folks. You do some click here to see the new site, give us your feedback type stuff. You get their feedback, you make changes, you're incrementing, you're focusing on just that. By the time you're done with the hockey stuff, you will have learned practically everything you would have learned from a total redesign. But you will have done it in this very safe place. Now, hockey isn't necessarily that safe because they all carry big sticks and they get very angry. Brian: But they do wear helmets. Jared: They do wear helmets. But yeah, I mean you've done it in this really sort of safe place where if it went terribly wrong, you would find out immediately, you'd be able to fix it immediately and the rest of the world would go on. Now, once you've learned that, then you go someplace completely different. Now maybe you go to a different part of the news. Let's say New York City news and the regional news for New York City. And you just change that site based on what you learn. Now, it's going to have some of the same issues, but because it's very different than hockey, you're going to discover new issues. OK, you work on that, you get that working. Now you've learned a tremendous amount of stuff from those two projects, you go to a third place, as piece by piece by piece, you change the site. Chances are it's going to take you 10%, 20% longer, than if you'd done a complete redesign of everything, but it's going to do it in such a way that you're going to learn every step of the way. As you go forward, bringing newer parts of the site up to par is going to go much faster because you're going to be so much smarter about what you're doing. Brian: So you don't think that as a user headed to your news site there, if they saw the hockey looks one way and the home and garden section looks so different, you don't think they'd be bothered? Like, have I stumbled on another site? Jared: No, because users don't care. That's the thing, users go from one website to another, the sites look radically different, they don't care. They don't care what the site looks like. All they care about is that the site is giving them whatever their goal is. So someone who's coming to the hockey news, who wants whatever it is from the hockey news, if that page is serving their needs, they're going to use it. No one's going to say, well, it's got everything I wanted to know about hockey right here, but because it doesn't look like the home and garden section, I'm not reading it. No one's going to say that. What they care about is that it has what they need. Someone who comes to a portion of a banking site that deals with home mortgages, isn't going to care that it doesn't look like the checking account portion of the site. As long as it has all their questions answered and it lets them do whatever they need to do. So you focus on that piece. You make the experience great for that page, for that user. They're not going to care that it looks completely different, yet you're going to be able to get all this feedback about how it's working for them, how it's not working for them, what pieces do work, what don't work. And that's just it, you can put these things up really fast. Brian: Well, that's great. I mean, that sounds like a much more informed way to move forward in small steps. And if you have small little creaks to fix, you can do a little bit at a time. Jared: That's exactly it, and the thing is that because these projects are small, you're flexible to change as the business changes. So many redesigns start down a path and then the business changes out from under them. They say, oh my God, this completely changes the way we have to do the redesign, we have to start over at square one, we have to go back, right? But this incremental approach lets you be maneuverable as the business shifts and ebbs and flows, which all businesses do. Brian: Well, great. All right, well thanks a lot, Jared. We'll bring this podcast to a close and we'll catch everyone next time. Thanks, Jared. Jared: You're welcome, Brian, thank you. [music] Announcer: We hope you've enjoyed this usability tools podcast. If you're interested in more of UIE's research, sign up for our free email newsletter. You can subscribe easily at uie.com. If you'd like to attend our next virtual seminar for free, just fill out our short podcasting survey at uie.com/audio. We'll give away free admission to one lucky respondent each week. We love hearing from you, send us your comments at mailbag@uie.com. That's all for this week, thanks for listening, goodbye. [music]