04 The Redesign Process

Understanding your users

A user-centred website starts with deeply understanding the people who visit it. You need to find out what's really going on for the people you're trying to help.

What do they need?

What frustrates them?

What language do they use?

If you finish your research without discovering something surprising, you likely haven't dug deep enough.

Open up the dialogue

Talk to people directly. If you can, interview them. Interviews are far more powerful than surveys for understanding motivations, challenges, and context. Surveys can be useful for gathering data from large groups where interviewing that many people would be impractical. A useful survey response can be a good prompt to follow up with an interview.

Usability testing, the act of asking people to do a task on your website and observing the experience, is invaluable for discovering issues. Pay attention to both the practical and emotional sides of their experience. You don't need hundreds of people, just five per round is enough to get valuable data. Run small tests frequently rather than one big study at the end. You'll learn more and have time to act on what you find.

Focus on goals and journeys

Understand goals and journeys, not just demographics. People define what your website is by what they're trying to achieve, not by how you've organised your internal teams or structured your services.

Ask yourself: where does their journey really start? It's probably not your homepage. Where does it end? It's probably not where you think. The better you understand the full picture, the more useful your website becomes.

Capture what you learn

User personas are a way of capturing what you've learned so you can use it throughout the project. A good persona is grounded in real people and real problems.

Keep them simple. Who is this person? What are they trying to do? What's getting in their way? Three or four well-crafted personas covering your key audience types is plenty.

Using personas

Create them, then actually use them. Don't let them collect dust in a drawer. When you're designing a page, writing content or debating a feature, ask: how does this help the people we're trying to reach? Are we addressing their needs and challenges? Personas turn abstract "user-centred thinking" into a practical decision-making tool.

The better you understand the people you're trying to serve, the more successful your redesign will be.