Website Redesign UX Guide 2023 (With A Case Study)
94% of the factors that affect users’ first impression of your digital product are design-related, according to Intechnic.
An incredibly high percentage confirms that your digital product’s UI is essential to its successful performance.
Therefore many startups and established companies often approach UX design companies, like Limeup, with website redesign UX requests.
Among the common UX website redesign questions we’ve got:
- Can you make our website look more professional?
- Our website design is old. Can you make it modern?
- Can you improve users’ perception of our website?
- Can you improve the usability of our website?
- Etc.
As a UX design company, we decided to create an in-depth guide to website redesign UX and share how to redesign a website UX, when it’s time to do it, and what the website redesign UX process looks like.
If you plan to redesign a digital product in the future, this guide will help you better understand what to pay attention to and what to expect from a website redesign UX.
When should you do a UX website redesign?
Website redesign is a resource and time-consuming process. Therefore, planning it wisely and having specific reasons for doing it are essential.
As a UX design company, we highlighted several occasions when it’s worth doing a UX website redesign. If your business struggles with any of these issues, it might be the right time to do it.
1. Users fail to understand your website’s focus
Every website is built for a reason. The majority of websites are niche, offering products and services to a particular group of people.
It’s essential to communicate the purpose and goals of your website to help your potential customers understand who you are and what you do.
It’s also worth considering the characteristics and consumption habits of different generations. For example, 51% of Gen-Z consumers would ensure a brand aligns with their values before making a purchase.
According to the McKinsey study, Generation Z supports sustainability, favors personalized experience, and searches for truth when assessing brands.
Consumers become more selective due to various product and service offerings. Therefore, it’s essential to communicate your website’s focus accurately.
Otherwise, your potential customers will turn to your competitors.
2. Users struggle to navigate your website
According to Goodfirms’ research, bad navigation is among the top three reasons why users leave websites.
Think about the last time you landed on a website and felt lost. Perhaps you wanted to find a particular web page buried somewhere on the website. So, you opened a few website categories, went through tag pages, and even used a search option, but without success. Feeling upset, you returned to the search engine and started typing a new inquiry.
This experience is frustrating.
It is a wasted time for a user and a lost opportunity for a business.
If you find your website’s navigation confusing or your users tell you they can’t find the required information, you need to redesign your website. This way, you’ll be able to rethink your website’s informational architecture and ensure the most important web pages are easily accessible.
3. Your website has a bad user experience
Our senior UX designer for hire, Daria, has defined the following signs of a website with usability issues:
- A slow loading speed
- Inability to interact with the website’s content
- Poor mobile experience
- A high bounce rate
- Lack of consistency
- Too much text
- No whitespace
If you spot any of the above-mentioned issues on your website, it’s probably time to do a website redesign UX.
Poor usability adversely affects users’ perception of your company and business KPIs. Furthermore, websites with poor user experience might lose rankings in organic search results. Google has a dedicated guide about page experience and its impact on ranking.
Therefore, taking care of your website’s usability will help you please your website users and Google.
Contact us if you want to redesign your website’s UX but don’t know where to start. Our UX experts will analyze your website’s performance, define usability issues and create an impactful UX design.
4. Users’ feedback about your website is negative
Have you ever asked your customers and website visitors for feedback? Their insights will help you understand what you do right and wrong in business and how your website meets users’ needs.
Hotjar is a popular tool website owners use to record user sessions and collect feedback. It helps you better understand what users do on your website, where they click, and when they leave your website.
At Limeup, we conduct user interviews and usability testing during UX website redesign to collect users’ feedback and implement it during the design work. We will talk more about usability testing later in this article.
Whatever method you use to get user feedback, if it’s negative for some objective reasons, you need to redesign a website UX.
5. Your website fails to meet your business objectives
Bill Gates once well-said:
“If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.”
Objectively, your business needs a website to appeal to your target audience worldwide. In a way, a website is a tool to achieve your business objectives, whether the number of leads, online sales, etc.
If your website consistently fails to meet your business objectives, then your business will be out of business.
You don’t want this to happen. Therefore, you have to search for solutions as a business owner.
At Limeup, we know that a website fails to support business objectives if it does not attract enough potential customers and cannot meet their needs.
We are convinced that it’s only possible to create an impactful UX design solution when we understand the core of the problem.
Therefore, we usually conduct user experience research to discover most usability problems on the client’s website before starting a major website redesign UX.
Contact us if you need help with website redesign UX. We are ready to help you improve your website’s usability and user interface design.
How to redesign a website UX
As a part of this article, we’d like to share one of our websites redesign UX case studies.
An American medical startup, Raccoon Recovery, contacted Limeup with a UX-related project.
The idea was to design and develop a custom healthcare platform to help patients recover from injuries faster and more effectively.
As a part of our UX design services, we kicked off the remote project with in-depth market research. We wanted to explore existing solutions and their effectiveness before designing a new healthcare platform.
In the meantime, our UX researchers conducted user interviews with the platform’s potential users to learn more about their needs. As a result of the research, we defined several user personas and created mockups summarizing collected insights.
The information from user experience research was later used during the prototyping and design phase.
User persona mockup created by the Limeup UX experts.
Even though collecting feedback from patients was challenging, it helped us understand the challenges our future healthcare platform should solve.
As a next step, we’ve created a low-fidelity clickable prototype to validate our hypothesis and see whether the target audience understands the navigation.
The prototype was iterated several times before our UX researchers ended up with a proven-to-work solution ready for design.
An intensive UX design phase took us a week to finish, involving two product designers, one UI designer, and one illustrator.
As a result of the design work, we’ve created 160 dark and light mode screens, including adaptive versions.
You can see an example of our UX design backed up by research created for Raccoon Recovery.
As a result of the design work, Raccoon Recovery received a €700,000 grant for its business growth. We are excited about the results of this impactful UX website redesign.
Contact us if you need help with UX design. Our team is ready to design and develop a custom solution for you.
We designed and developed a healthcare platform for a medical startup from the USA.
Website redesign UX process
As a UX design company, we have a well-defined and proven-to-work UX design process that our UX experts have used to create impactful UX solutions for years.
For this article, we’ve described 8 steps to redesign a website UX in detail. Whether you choose to work with a freelancer or partner with a UX agency, you’ll know how the UX website redesign process is organized and what to expect from the collaboration.
1. Kick-off meeting
At Limeup, we start every project with a kick-off meeting with stakeholders and the client’s product team. We believe getting to know each side well, learning about the business, discussing the current challenges and project goals for UX website redesign, and setting the right expectations are essential.
Furthermore, we also use the kick-off meeting to discuss means and frequency of communication. We usually have a weekly call to communicate updates, discuss questions and agree on the tasks for the next week. In between the calls, we stay in touch through various communication tools, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and emails, to say a few.
2. Market research
As soon as all questions are discussed, our UX team starts the project with market research.
The goal is to explore competitors and their solutions before the UX website redesign. We collect data about competitors’ user interface design, informational architecture, website structure, service pages and their structure, unique selling points, and branding.
Even the tiniest design elements can be crucial in creating a positive experience and brand perception for potential customers. Therefore, our team collects and analyzes this data before conducting UX research.
3. User experience research
According to Intechnic, only 55% of companies currently conduct user experience testing. We’d say it is a relatively low number. Failure to consider users’ pain points results in product design that is unable to meet users’ needs.
Jeff Sauro from MeasuringU conducted research, where he realized that 5 usability tests help discover over 85% of all UX problems.
5 tests are not much, but the value you’ll get from talking to your users is tremendous!
As a UX design company, we understand the business value of user experience research and its importance for impactful UX design. Therefore, we never start a design phase without collecting usability data and users’ feedback.
Our UX researchers use various research methods during UX research, such as usability tests, user interviews, surveys, and field research, to name a few.
We jump to the next step after we interview the client’s target audience and former clients to get their feedback about the website.
4. Creating a clickable prototype
A clickable prototype is a mock-up of a future digital product. It is usually black and white, featuring the main design elements and navigation.
Our UX researchers usually create clickable prototypes. Depending on the website’s size and complexity and users’ insights, it may take up to one day to create a prototype for usability testing.
As soon as the prototype is ready, we continue our UX process for website redesign by running several usability tests with the client’s target audience and former customers.
5. Usability testing
We usually run 3-5 usability tests with participants, each lasting one hour. The goal is to validate the design concept, see whether users understand a new layout, whether they can easily navigate a website, understand the website’s purpose and copy, and quickly find the required information.
Changing the website’s architecture and design elements during the prototyping phase is faster and cheaper than creating a pixel-perfect website redesign UX.
6. Prototype iteration
We would not be able to create a user-centered website design without running usability tests and discovering valuable insights from users.
As soon as we are done testing the prototype, we usually have many useful insights on improving the final product design. The insights from usability tests are used to iterate the prototype, ensuring all feedback is implemented.
Upon the prototype iteration, our UX researchers test it with new usability test participants one more time. If no flaws are detected during the last round of usability testing, the up-to-date and validated design is passed to our UX design professionals.
7. User experience design
At this step of the UX process for website redesign, we work on the final, pixel-perfect, and user-centered design. One or two UX designers are usually involved in the process. However, we sometimes add more UX designers depending on the complexity of a product.
Our UX experts create several designs with different colors and branding elements for the client’s approval. Once we get the client’s feedback, our designers will continue working on the redesign website UX.
We showcase our designs and discuss work progress during our weekly meetings.
Along with the final product design, we hand over the UI kit, a set of files that contains critical user interface components like fonts, layered design files, icons, documentation, and HTML or CSS files. The client’s product team can use the UI kit at any time for their needs.
8. Development
At Limeup, we offer development support or full-cycle product development depending on the client’s needs.
Our team of skilled developers, engineers, and technical experts work with the following technologies but are not limited to:
Backend: Java, Node.js, Golang, Python.
Frontend: React.js, Vue.js.
Mobile: Swift, Kotlin, React Native.
The goal of the last step of the website redesign UX process is to implement UX design correctly without flaws and mistakes.
Contact us if you need help with user experience design. Our team of 40+ UX experts will help you design and develop a custom solution.
How much does it cost to do a website redesign UX?
We admit UX work has never been cheap.
UX design and research experts are usually involved in a website redesign UX project. Besides the design work, additional costs might be incurred for usability testing with the target audience.
Even though most companies want to know the costs of a website redesign UX in advance, predicting it accurately is challenging.
According to our UX design expert Daria, the costs of redesigning a website UX depend on the following:
- The complexity of a website
- Project duration
- The size of the UX team
- Whether UX research is part of the project
- The number of usability test participants involved
- Whether a freelancer or a UX agency implements the project
- Etc.
We’ve mentioned just a few of the most important criteria. Depending on a particular case, more factors can impact the costs of website redesign UX.
At Limeup, we’ve written an article analyzing the top UX design companies worldwide, including their hourly rates.
Our quick research has revealed that the minimum project budget you should allocate to work with UX design agencies is $10,000.
The project budget should cover the kick-off meeting with stakeholders, UX research, usability testing with the target audience, product prototype creation, UX design and iterations, and product development (optional).
We recommend discussing the scope of work with your preferred design partner to clarify the collaboration process and each side’s liabilities and obligations.
Need help with UX website redesign?
Contact us to discuss your UX design project.
From user experience design and research to UX design and development, we are ready to help you with your project.
Our team consists of 40+ professionals with practical experience in different industries, such as healthcare, real estate, crypto, edtech, fintech, and igaming, to name a few.
We’ve helped startups and established companies worldwide create impactful UX design solutions. Now, we are ready to help you with any UX-related challenges.
