Ten Sure-Fire Ways to Screw Up Your Next Web Redesign (Part 2)
I've screwed up web redesigns almost every way possible. Part 2 of my tips to help you avoid common pitfalls.
Before you embark on your next web site redesign project, why not make things really challenging? At Velir, a digital experience agency, we’ve helped lots of organizations reach new levels of digital maturity and improved website performance. Along the way, we’ve also uncovered some common mistakes that will keep just about any web redesign from achieving its full potential. Here are ten common mistakes that can derail even the most well-intentioned project.
6. Bring customers in at the end to make sure everything makes sense.
You had the best intentions. You were going to develop a test-proven, user-centric, persona-driven humdinger of a redesign. Then Reality stepped in – and with it came things like budget, schedule, and resources limitations. User testing had to take a backseat to these other priorities. Now you’ve got three weeks to launch and, hey, there’s a little time and money left! Why not spend them on some usability testing for the final product, just as a sanity check. Better late than never, right?
Well, yes. But much better early than late. While it’s never a bad idea to get customer input on a redesign, it’s always better to do it as far upstream as possible. That way, even if the feedback is directional or broad in nature, at least you’ll have some user-generated data points to base everything upon downstream. By waiting until the last minute to involve your users, you risk spending lots of time and money developing a solution that doesn’t necessarily meet your user’s needs. If you discover that you are on the entirely wrong path, or you need to make major changes to make the site more usable and effective, it may be too late and too expensive to recover. So plan to incorporate user testing early and often. And stick to your guns.