Thinking about redesigning? Definitely it must be about increasing your revenue. Well, be cautious. The results you may see after redesign might not be the same as you are expecting. In fact, they often come opposite, just as Forrester study suggests, redesign provides a 44% chance to decrease performance, a 39% chance to decrease conversion, and a 25% chance to decrease average order value.
This is scary.
However, you can avoid it and for that you need to act more than a creative director. You need to incorporate smart intelligence tools across your entire design process.
Before you redesign……
Pretty obviously, you need to have insights from your existing web analytics. You need to spot your high performing pages, you need to spot the pages that drive more traffic and then compare them to see which ones are getting higher bounce rate than your website’s average bounce rate. These are the pages that you need to work on.
You need to understand how people interact with your website. Generally you can pull off insights from your analytics tools, but it’s better you get direct customer feedback from different tools, such as pop-ups etc.
Qualaroo is a very good tool that you can choose to survey your visitors,
Moreover, you need to run a conversion test on your website’s different pages and see which elements are working and which aren’t. Simple A/B testing can get you the insights you need. For example, compare your products pages – one with product videos and others without videos. See if conversion rate of those pages with videos is higher than those without videos or not. If videos are not helping you convert your visitors, why not save money by not making videos.
Finally, there are heat mapping tools that you can apply on your website and see which elements in a page are getting visitors’ attention and which are not. Some tools even allow visitor sessions and allow you to learn their behavior that you’d have not known otherwise. Remember, heat mapping tools such as Crazy Egg or Click Tale .
While you are Redesigning……
Now that you know what pages are doing great and what are not. You know what elements are good and what are not. You also know most noticed sections within a certain page. Isn’t it a great information that you would ever need to pull off a great design.
So, be intelligent and translate all this information wisely into a redesign project.
Once you have your design ‘redo’, do the usability testing. It gives you the direct input about how your design will perform in a real life. Meanwhile, get your SEO guys straight onto your new design. It’s too easy to forget that even a great design needs Search Engine Optimization.
The Big Launch……
Everything’s been done systematically. But still, what’s the rush? You should run beta testing for good amount of time. This is not just an average activity at the end of design process. We do it to find and remove any roadblocks, validate newly introduced Call to actions, refine the design to it’s most intuitive possible layout. To get the most of your beta testing, run your regular marketing campaigns, discounts, PPC, email blasts and get as much data as possible. You would see the difference.
2 Things 2 Remember
Your existing design is bad only when you can have the better one. Your data is your true friend. Trust it. If you are looking for an ecommerce partner to help you with your redesign, you know where to find us. We are always happy to sit with you, discuss your painpoints and get you on top of your game, AGAIN.