UI Designs and redesigns

You know how it is. You get a beautiful design for your new web or mobile applications. Typography, colors, everything is trendy. Perhaps it is following Google Material Design principles, perhaps it is a classic.

There is never such a things as Perfect UI that everyone loves.

You, your business partners and your clients. Everyone has a different opinion and different expectations. During your design process, even within your team you will have conflicting ideas and you will try to find a compromise everyone likes. I hope you will avoid the famous “Design by Committee” approach in this process.

Every user will find something they like, and everyone will find something they wish was different. This is life. Different tastes, different roles, different behaviors.
Important is your UI is intutive and gives possibility to your users to do what they want with least hassle possible. You will prioritize use cases and give priority to those use cases that are the most critical. perhaps a functionality that is used once a month will not be as polished as the one used daily. But projects have budgets, timelines. Prioritization is key.

It takes time for your users to get accustomed to a new UI and to the experience that comes with it.

Once you launch, your users will start getting accustomed to their new application. If it is familiar to the ones they have been using before, learning curve will be less. If you are developing an enteprise app where users are forced to use it, good for you. You can get away with certain mediocre design choices. However if you are competing in a crowded space, say a messaging app in app store, world is tough. You have to convince your users to choose your app. Here is UX far more important and is a competitive advantage.

UI Redesign Takeaways

Focus on the use case, and the target audience. Getting early feedback from potential users is always useful. Even if yo want to make every stakeholder happy, avoid “Design by Committee” at all costs. A design has to be consistent, coherent. It is not a basket of wishes to make every single stakeholder happy.

Once your UI launches, you will get true feedback. There will be Aha moments or “How did we not think of this?” questions. This is normal. If the improvements are small do incrementally and quickly. If there are major changes, collect those ideas, analyse them to see if these are conflicting or coherent. Make a new version of UI while keeping impact on your users low. Unless your original design was a catastrophy, this means, you do not need to redesign your application from scratch. You can keep the spirit and still improve the UX and the return.