Below I have outlined six steps to redesign your website so it is customer-centric and data driven.
1. What is your objective?
From giving your site a facelift to implementing a completely responsive design, it is important to be clear about the objective of your redesign. Before diving into a redesign project, I always recommend stepping back and looking at the big picture. What is your objective? Do you want to increase conversion? If so, optimizing a couple of key pages might be the solution rather than a comprehensive redesign. (For more information about how to optimize conversion check out our blog post – How to effectively optimize conversion using customer feedback) While if you want to provide visitors a more fluid experience, a redesign might be the answer. Asking these questions prior to the redesign process will help you save time, money and resources. By following the S.M.A.R.T principle and defining specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related goals, you put your redesign process on solid footing from the get go.
2. Have you done your research?
One of the biggest mistakes of any redesign is jumping into execution before understanding the needs of your visitors, customers and prospects. Too often the opinions of your visitors are an afterthought in the redesign process. According to Janrain, 74 percent of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content appears that has nothing to do with their interests. Also Google found that 88 percent of consumers research before they buy, consulting an average of 10.4 sources. The online space is fierce and to meet the growing expectations of empowered consumers, you need to understand them. That’s why I recommend conducting Voice of Customer research prior to a site redesign. Collecting a representative sample of feedback from your visitors through an intercept survey, is one of the most effective methods to collect the voice of your customers. This will provide an accurate view of what is working on your site and what needs to be fixed from the perspective of your customers. By conducting Voice of Customer research and combining it with your web analytics data, you can pinpoint your current sites’ strengths and weaknesses and start building your redesign roadmap with confidence.
3. Do you have buy in from key stakeholders?
Everyone has an opinion about what to change from c-level executives to developers. It is important to get buy in from all key stakeholders but equally important to ensure they don’t hijack the process. To ensure that your site redesign is focusing on the customer experience, it is essential that the voice of your customers is an integral part of the redesign process and everyone agrees. From experience, the most effective way to do this is to establish baseline metrics to set priorities and measure performance pre and post launch. From our research, the baseline metrics for customer experience should focus on measuring visitors’ intent, task completion, and the drivers of satisfaction and referral. These baseline metrics will provide a clear vision of how you are going to align your internal resources to support the customer experience and measure the success of the redesign. You can accomplish this by sharing an executive dashboard of your baseline metrics across departments pre-launch, during launch and post launch.
4. Did you consider SEO?
‘SEO is dead’. This is a headline that has been doing the rounds recently and with good reason. Organic traffic is down and consumers are searching on social media platforms more than ever before. But saying SEO is dead is pure hyperbole. Searching is more diversified than ever, but Google is still king. Our research shows that ‘search’ is still the number one path to site with 34 percent of website visitors. Keeping this in mind, SEO will be an important part of any redesign project as you need to rank high in search results for your prospects and customers to find you. Just to give an example of the importance of SEO, HubSpot highlighted how in 2009, Toys R Us paid $5.1 million to buy the Toys.com domain name, purely for the SEO value.
Toys R Us forwarded the entire domain of Toys.com to ToysRUs.com without using 301 redirects, and, therefore, Google de-indexed all of the Toys.com pages. This meant Toys R Us lost a lot of potential SEO value from the purchase. This is an extreme case, but a good lesson. You have likely worked hard to rank high on Google, so make sure you preserve it during a redesign. This includes all the SEO value from your content marketing efforts from blog posts to landing pages. If you are not diligent it could take a long time to rebuild. For a more detailed look at how to ensure you don’t lose any of your SEO juice in the redesign process check out Search Engine Land SEO migration strategy post or Search Engine Journal’s post on how to avoid SEO disaster.
5. Are you prepared for the recovery curve?
Everyone assumes that a redesign will see immediate improvements but according to our research, visitors’ satisfaction typically dips immediately following a re-design and recovers approximately three to four months after, depending on the industry. This is what we call the recovery curve. While no two changes are the same, the dip and subsequent recovery are a very common phenomenon as demonstrated in graph 1.
Graph 1 – An example of a website redesign recovery curve
This seems counterintuitive but it is not. When you think about it, it makes sense. Repeat visitors are unfamiliar with the new site design and have difficulty finding what they need. Interestingly, though the satisfaction ratings of the site drop, when the majority of returning visitors are asked they will say the site has improved! The open-end comments validate this finding. Often we see the number of positive comments about the change trump the number of negative comments.
The satisfaction scores drop because people want improvement, just not the details of the change. It’s like asking someone if the new house they bought is better. Of course it is – but they may also complain endlessly about all the issues associated with moving in, what’s missing, and how hard this or that is to find. It’s the same with your site visitors. The key is to have baseline KPIs which will be invaluable in tracking the satisfaction and adoption of the new design over time. Making management aware of the potential for an early dip and keeping internal stakeholders positive will be imperative.
6. Do you have a post-redesign strategy?
Now that you have launched, your satisfaction scores have recovered and other priorities are calling, you may think the redesign is behind you. But it’s not. The key to a website that meets customers’ expectations is to continuously optimizing the site according to feedback.
One of the most effective ways to continually optimize the customer experience is by collecting an ongoing feed of comments from visitors who are having an experience worth commenting about. This specific feedback will come from visitors having either extreme positive or negative experiences. When asked, these visitors will give the kind of feedback that provides the opportunities for remediation or at the other end of the spectrum highlight the strongest aspects of the experience. To learn more about optimizing the customer experience check out my post on Measuring and managing the customer experience, is not the same as optimizing it.
Final thoughts
Caroline Duncan, content manager at Sainsbury’s, said that, “If you’re redesigning your website you’ll hopefully have lots of information on what doesn’t work. Don’t forget to use it in the redesign. All too often I’ve seen valuable analytics and research discarded or duplicated in redesign projects.” This is a good lesson. Too often we get overwhelmed with a redesign and forget to step back. When it comes to redesign projects that have the objective of improving the customer experience, it only makes sense to incorporate your customers’ into the process. That is why, I recommend that every redesign idea start by collecting the Voice of the Customer to understand what is working and what is not from their perspective. By following these 6 steps, you will stay ahead of the game by designing a site that has the customer in mind.
