UX process for redesigning your website

Lindi Wheaton — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:19:04 +0000

UX process with proven results Website redesigns are a huge risk. You can throw away years of incremental gains in UX and site performance—unless you have a battle-tested process. But what does that process look like? And how do you know if your team—or the one you’ve hired—is focusing on the most important things? Many areas yield minor improvements, but to make a real difference, and protect past progress, you need a repeatable, evidence-based approach. I’m going to walk you step-by-step through our company’s UX research process for site redesigns—the role of each aspect, how long each should take, and what, generally, each entails. That knowledge will help you: 4 Key components: As noted at the outset, full-scale site redesigns have the potential to backfire. A high-level stakeholder can overrule research-based decisions, designers can clash with optimizers, and the bevy of simultaneous changes can make it impossible to identify which changes are to blame if a redesign performs worse than its predecessor. A “radical redesign” contrasts with a process of ongoing experimentation. That incremental approach makes it easier to isolate the impact of individual changes and avoid the risk of a total redesign. It also avoids a years-long fallow period between redesigns when competitors may continue to move ahead. That said, there are three strong arguments for a complete redesign: Other issues may also prompt a large-scale redesign, like a site that relies on old technology (e.g. Flash) or one whose design is clearly dated. (The latter scenario is common among startups whose rapid growth makes an initial “homemade” site appear amateurish.) If a full-scale redesign is the right choice, the process starts with a comprehensive research plan that includes both generative and evaluative research. Generative vs. evaluative research While there are several categories of user research, the most important breakdown is between generative and evaluative research. Generative research helps you understand your user’s world, learn more about their challenges, and generate ideas for your new website design. These techniques—such as stakeholder and user interviews, which I cover below—are mostly qualitative because the best audience insights surface during conversation and observation. When you’re building your research plan, put generative techniques at the beginning. That way, the research will define the direction of your design. Evaluative research validates how well your redesign solves the problems that inspired the redesign. Evaluative methods are quantitative—numbers measure the effectiveness the redesign. Examples of evaluative methods: Don’t rush through the generative techniques. It’s natural to want to move quickly, get something designed, and test the design. But if you conduct only evaluative research, you’re just testing your ideas instead of building a website based on what users want. The importance of combining generative and evaluative research A prime example of how to combine research methods is HubSpot’s redesigned homepage. This page alone pulls in more than 4 million visits a month, so the stakes for the redesign were pretty high. Because HubSpot had so much traffic, they had a treasure trove of data. The design team identified patterns in how people navigated the homepage. Using a combination of Google Analytics, heat mapping, and session recordings, they uncovered three recurring patterns related to FAQs, pricing, and product information. But they didn’t settle for quantitative data: HubSpot’s team wanted to hear directly from their users—particularly different personas. The design team interviewed customers and stakeholders, even gathering intel from tweets, support calls, and other qualitative sources. In the end, their research informed a new homepage design that boosted KPIs for HubSpot’s marketing team—specifically, increased engagement with and more free-trial signups. Which methods should you use to redesign your website? And in what order? Every project is different, so the process needs to be flexible, but there are fundamental steps that apply to almost any web design project. Before you do any research, however, you need to build the business case. Making the business case for UX research. Whether it’s convincing your CEO they don’t know everything about their users or just securing enough budget for research, these conversations can be difficult. Involve all the primary stakeholders in your company. Most objections to user research can be overcome by pointing out a simple truth: Making changes to the design later in the process—when development resources are involved—is very, very expensive. Conducting user research early and often mitigates that risk. It also ensures that the functions in your redesign are what your customers want. The longer you wait to make changes to the design, the more expensive it becomes. Once you have internal buy-in, you can get started with research. (Note: This pre-research period is also the time to discover what research, if any, has already been conducted.) The 3 phases of UX research for site redesigns Phase 1: Discovery and planning This initial phase gathers internal perspectives, catalogs existing content, and includes a heuristic evaluation of the current site. Step 1: Stakeholder interviews Although stakeholders are not your customers, they can: Stakeholders can usually be divided into three groups: Schedule one-hour meetings with leaders in each category. The goal of each interview is to understand the project from the stakeholder’s perspective and identify how they define success. Stakeholder interview questions break down into four themes: The actual questions can be quite lengthy, so I won’t list them all here, but there are multiple resources. Finally, lay the ground rules for communication. Here are a few questions we ask to finish off our onboarding process and set expectations for the rest of the project: Step 2: Content audit Like the previous step, a content audit is about discovery: You need to understand what already exists on your current website before you can plan a new design. A content audit builds a master list of all your content and may also uncover previously unknown relationships between content types. The main idea is to build a series of increasingly specific silos for your content. In nearly every case, the largest content group will be your blog. Here’s a sample content audit we conducted for one of our clients: We started with the navigation and worked […]

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UX process for redesigning your website