Web designers browse website after website and app after app, praising aesthetically beautiful user interfaces and huffing approvingly at clean user experiences. When it comes to design, the temptation to follow your instincts is an attractive and overwhelming feeling, exasperated by the vast amount of creative influence and inspiration that can be found online. This is nothing new, and most people know the problems that are born out of diving headfirst into a design without proper preparation and planning.

In my experience, without following certain steps it can be easy to create new designs that don’t actually solve problems or improve anything, so with this short article, I'd like to share the four preparational processes that I've learned to incorporate into my redesign workflow.

Step 1: Understand the redesign requirements

This is an absolutely essential first step, without which a lot of time and effort can potentially be wasted. There are important questions that need to be asked here, some of which include:

Are you redesigning the whole platform? Or just select pages/features?
Do you need just a UI refresh? Or an improvement to both UI and UX?
Do you need to consider multiple platforms such as web, mweb, iOS, Android, tablet, etc.?
What’s the time frame?
Are there brand guidelines that need to be followed?

The questions that you ask will change, depending on the company, team and product you’re working with, but it’s important to be clear on what is being asked of you from the very beginning.

Step 2: Understand the current situation

By this, I mean really understanding.

It’s not enough to browse the pages a few times and scroll up and down till you know what it looks like. It’s essential to know how it works, why it was designed this way (i.e. what were the original goals with each page and feature, and what were the technical hurdles that had to be taken into consideration), and of course, what’s good or bad about it.

The first two questions can be answered by designers, developers and stakeholders who worked on the previous design, but the latter question cannot be solely answered by this side of the wall - it needs to be answered by data from actual users. These are people who actually experience the joys and pains of using the platform, without any prior knowledge of how it’s supposed to work. Get your hands on as much information as you can, look at engagement and user retention on GA, check out user heatmaps, and definitely try to actually speak to users.

When redesigning, this can be the difference between just making a website look prettier, and actually taking the user’s experience to the next level.

Step 3: Understand your audience

This step comes in two further sub-steps: identifying your target audience, and identifying the goals you want them to achieve on your platform. Simply put, doing this will help you visualise UX flows that are catered to your specific audience while making sure your focus lies in helping them complete their intended actions.

Are you designing for people with a lot of free time on their hands? Are they busy? Do they need more detailed information? Do they need less?

There are learnings that you can action only once you’ve taken the time to consider who is using the platform and why.

Step 4: Understand your plan of action

By the time you’ve done all this pre-design investigating, ideas have started forming in your mind and you probably already have a good idea of what you want this new platform to look like. Resist that temptation for just a little longer!

There are a bunch of things you need to ask yourself and set straight first. The order in which you set out your tasks completely depends on your style of work, but without explicitly arranging your workflow into steps with checkpoints for feedback, it can be easy to jump ahead to a point where backtracking becomes difficult.

Are you starting from scratch? Using the previous design as a template? Using an entirely different template? To answer questions like these, and to know more about the direction in which you want to go, there will be a lot of wider research into concept mockups and design trends that can inform your design strategy and process - I would suggest indulging in that step at this point.

Oh, and one last thing: try and get all the content you might need as early as possible. This is a frustratingly common source of conflict between designers and copywriters. Lorem ipsum is useful, but designing to fit specifically created messaging is much more efficient than creating content to fit a design.

Conclusion

Getting started with a redesign is a whole project in and of itself, made up mostly of planning, research and asking the right questions. I’ve been guilty of not following some/all of these steps at various times in my design career so far, but as I picked up these different points into my workflow, I found that my ability to collaborate with developers and product managers improved considerably, since I had a lot more opportunities to discuss different perspectives - something which I feel has been, and will continue to be, absolutely essential to my growth as a designer.