Oh boy. If anyone's in need of some web design services, I know people who'll keep the customer frustrated for a far more modest sum.
I regret my website redesign
481–490 of 789 posts
Re: I regret my website redesign
#482This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our checkout flow and we wanted it done in time for Black Friday, which was by far our biggest day of the year. Of course the project ran long and we crunched so that we could ship the redesign exactly on Black Friday. I think we shipped the Tuesday before (because Thanksgiving) and everything seemed…
Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think” , and any changes, even improvements, reset that.
Have to admit, when I saw the two screenshots, I thought the OP's problem would be exactly that, not the agency process. Original design not great but has a big picture of a hardware device, an unmissable order button and some explainer videos. New design much more visually appealing, but looks like a different company, potentially even a different class of product and whilst the order button isn't exactly difficult to find, it's not shouting as loudly to act.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#483he is a marketing genius to me, writing stuff that catching eyeballs that might end up selling more his devices, I feel the postmortem of the website project is really not the point(or true goal here) at all.
Plot twist: it was WebAgency's plan all along.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned they were going off script and building whatever they wanted. This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep paying someone when they're doing work you didn't ask for, doing work that doesn't align with your goals, and ignoring what you say?
That seems to be the point where sunk cost fallacy strikes hard in the post to me. They had paid $X for "80% of the first milestone of work" and that sunk cost locks them in to everything else that happens. They seemed too fearful from that point onward that if they fired the agency and brought in a new agency or freelancer that they would start from square 1 and do all of the previous work (and spend) over again. Th…
This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”.
Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#485I'll take a contrarian position here. You paid for professional services that you could afford, you got them, and they made you more money. It's the definition of a good investment and a successful project. Will also add that based on the happy conclusion of your story the title is almost clickbait — and highly effective clickbait at that, since you've now gotten 1000s of targeted HN eyeballs. I can't imagine how muc…
That only worked because op had another 39k to throw at the problem.
Imagine if he did not, and he ended with no redesign and no money and needing to find a lawyer..
Re: I regret my website redesign
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that the most important factor when considering old reddit vs new reddit UI/UX isn't a matter of preference based upon performance, certain content, or habit. Old.reddit is actually just better for the end user experience overall and new reddit UI is better for Reddit's ad revenue. Many times a user not wanting to switch to a new UI isn't based completely in effort/adaptability but a history of experien…
The fact that new reddit defaults to showing only a few comments on the post, followed by recommending 20 other unrelated posts, just shows how badly aligned that design is with their goals. Reddit is a glorified web forum. Period. Making comments hidden and difficult to browse basically negates 50% of it's function (the other being media + content discoverability).
I imagine it's quite well aligned with their goals of getting increased user engagement metrics from increased clicks to read stuff from casual browsers to the site, and convincing regular users they should download the app
Of course it's extremely badly aligned with their regular user's goals of reading comments, but that's solved by using the old.reddit urls if not the app, whilst the casual browser coming in from Google or a link gets the full on contempt for users' desire to actually read threads UX until they've bumped the user engagement metrics up by clicking on more stuff.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#487Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.
First thing, thanks for your post, it has been really interesting. I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product is a very good one and would have expected that your intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site design[0]: >But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website…
Thanks for reading!
>I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product is a very good one and would have expected that your intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site design
Yeah, I tried not to lean too hard on this because I don't have rigorous evidence that the redesign caused the improvement. But anecdotally, it seems like it did.
Usually when the website sees a significant uptick in sales, I can usually tie it to a particular event (e.g., a new review, new product launch), but nothing notable happened in May or June except that we finished the new designs, and they were some of our strongest months. It could just be that we're growing over time, so maybe the same thing would have happened either way.
One other change to the website that I feel like is well-supported by this point was changing how we present our products. We used to show four products in our catalog, but in November, we simplified the website to show only our flagship product, and it was almost an overnight doubling of sales that's persisted ever since:
https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to-ju...
Re: I regret my website redesign
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate the feedback, but the hard part about feedback like this is: how do I identify who's right? Half the people in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half are saying the new design is better. If I could flip a switch and try the design you're describing and see how it affects sales, I'd try it, but taking professional photographs and redesigning the site is several thousa…
>how do I identify who's right? Half the people in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half are saying the new design is better. You look at the data. If you think the increased sales are due to the site redesign vs some other variable - well there's your answer.
The data aren't entirely conclusive. My sales increased but I can't prove it was due to the new design.
I could A/B test the old design against the new, but my sales volume is low enough that it could take weeks before we get compelling results for any experiment.
It's easy to come up with lots of ideas for design improvements, but it's much harder to actually implement them and then measure the results.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#489hey since looking at your site, i have seen about 10 of your TinyPilot ads. I am certainly not in the market for one of these and probably not that many other people who viewed the article site are, so i suggest you dial back on the retargeting budget following this hacker news traffic, save yourself some money. The hacker news readers who are in the market have already seen your best piece of marketing for the produ…
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm paying per click, so I think that should still work fine, but I'll speak with TinyPilot's marketing freelancer about this.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#490[deleted]