UI UX Redesign for Legacy Apps: Process and Best Practices
Studies reveal that 40% of users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load, and 88% will never visit your platform again if they encounter a bad experience. This is causing retailers a significant annual loss of $2.6 billion in revenue in the US alone. These losses can be even more critical for businesses operating outdated systems.
To stay competitive, it’s important to have a strategic UI/UX redesign to improve your app’s aesthetics and performance. This way, you attract visitors and retain them, potentially increasing conversion rates by 200% to 400%.
In this guide, we’ll explore the process and best practices for revamping your company’s legacy app’s UI/UX. This will help to ensure that it meets user expectations, drives engagement, and boost your business’s bottom line.
UI UX Redesign Explained
UI UX redesign enhances a product’s visual elements, interactive features, and technical performance. It improves how a product looks, feels, and works — key components for creating a rich user experience and engagement. For websites, this entails revamping the overall layout and functionality, including navigation, color scheme, and content structure of your legacy site. It can also involve optimizing speed, technical performance, search engine optimization, or adopting responsive web design.
A regular app or web redesign and maintenance is crucial for your company’s growth and market relevance. But what aspects indicate it’s time for a redesign UI UX? Let’s review the critical factors.
CTA: Increase conversion rates with a strategic UI/UX redesign. Follow industry leaders and modernize with ModLogix. Let’s talk.
When Does a Company Need a UI UX Redesign?
To know whether it’s time for UI UX app redesign, you need to check your key performance metrics. Ask: What do users think? What do they like or find frustrating? Also, before you begin to redesign UI UX, learn if any market trends make your design look outmoded. Compare your application with your competitor’s platform.
Let’s break down these aspects and perspectives:
1. The Target Customer
| Perspective | Explanation |
| Poor user reviews | Start by analyzing user reviews on app stores or review platforms like Yelp and Google My Business. Prospective customers trust reviews of current customers 12 times more than descriptions provided by the company. Look for recurring themes or issues mentioned by users. Identify specific pain points and areas where users express dissatisfaction. This direct feedback provides valuable insights into what aspects of your UI/UX need improvement. Consider both positive and negative reviews to understand what is working and what needs enhancement. |
| Low retention rate | Review user engagement numbers for any drop-offs or declines in retention. Low retention rates might mean users aren’t finding value or facing usability problems. Analyze the user journey to pinpoint where users are dropping off. Understanding these patterns will help fix any weak spots in the user experience, and make users stay longer and engage more on your app or website. |
| Low conversion rate | Check your conversion metrics to see how well your app or website turns visitors into users or customers. A low conversion rate could mean problems like confusing calls-to-action or unclear value propositions. Simplifying processes, refining content and messaging, and making it easier for users to take action in your app redesign project will improve poor conversation. |
2. Key Competitors
| Perspective | Explanation |
| Competitors with better UI UX | Conduct a competitive analysis to identify industry leaders or competitors with superior UI/UX. Explore their apps or websites to understand what elements contribute to a better user experience. Assess their design choices, navigation, and features. Identify opportunities to adopt best practices while adding your unique value proposition to stand out in the market. |
| New market trends | Stay informed about the most recent UI/UX trends. Explore new and functional design patterns, interactive features, and innovative capabilities. Incorporating modern trends can not only enhance the visual appeal but also signal to users that your app or website is modern and consistent with today’s users’ expectations. However, ensure that the trends you’d like to adopt align with your brand and user needs, rather than just making superficial UI changes. |
Successful UI Redesign Examples
Let’s explore notable examples of successful UI/UX redesigns across industries, highlighting the transformative impact of user-centered app or website redesign strategy.
| Industry | Example | Problem | Upgrade |
| Software & Tech | Slack | Slack’s old design needed site redesign as it confused users with unclear navigation, especially when accessing workspaces and profiles. It needed a visual refresh and new features without overwhelming users. | The UI redesign keeps familiar features like Direct Messages and Search while improving navigation and adding a streamlined ‘Plus’ icon for actions. It also includes an Activity Tab, Workflow Builder, and AI for notifications and automation. |
| Non-Profit/ Online Information | Wikipedia | Wikipedia’s old desktop interface was inaccessible and didn’t have modern features. This made it hard to use and discouraged people from exploring content. | Wikipedia recently rolled out its first significant desktop user interface update in 10 years, focusing on usability and accessibility. It now has a better search experience with images and descriptions, easy language switching, and a sticky header for navigation. It also has a table of contents for context and navigation within articles. The site redesign considered user feedback from around the world to meet the needs of the Wikipedia community. |
| Finance | The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) | The RBS offers another notable UI redesign case study. Its old technology led to IT issues such as blocked accounts and payment glitches, making its systems unable to meet modern banking needs. Their outdated IBM mainframes struggled to meet customer demand. | RBS revamped its mobile app UI redesign, offering improved accessibility and convenience. The redesign additionally aids blind users, enables swift payments without a card reader, and lets users manage standing orders and direct debits directly in the app. |
UI Redesign Process
Redesigning a legacy app’s UI enhances its appeal, functionality, and user experience. Follow these steps for a successful app or website redesign project:
- Evaluate Current Design: The first step to a makeover website or app is to analyze its design. Identify strengths and weaknesses. Review user feedback and analytics.
- Set Clear Goals: Ask what your app or website needs, what’s missing, and what goals you want to achieve. Set measurable objectives (e.g., increase traffic, improve time on site, generate leads, boost order value, or grow subscribers).
- Conduct User Research: Understand user needs and preferences via surveys, interviews, tests, and analytics. Prioritize user-centric features
- List Pages to Focus On: Focus on landing pages that contribute most based on conversion rates, traffic, and objectives to optimize resource allocation in the redesign.
- Create User Personas and User Flows: To design user-centric experiences, and develop user personas and user flows based on research findings. Personas help empathize with users, while flows visualize their journeys.
- Create Wireframes: Brainstorm design ideas and create wireframes to outline your improved UI’s structure and functionality. Prioritize intuitiveness, clarity, user interactions, and usability.
- Design Interactive Prototypes: Turn wireframes into high-fidelity designs by incorporating visual elements. Simulate user interactions with interactive prototypes. Ensure cross-screen consistency, adhere to branding guidelines, and maintain accessibility.
- Iterate Designs: Refine your UX website redesign based on real user feedback and usability testing. Apply user-centered principles to optimize usability and accessibility. Focus on visual aesthetics, typography, colors, and branding for a cohesive interface.
- Test Final Design Usability: Prioritize testing to ensure the app or website makeover resonates with users. Real feedback helps identify obstacles, increasing launch success.
- Involve Executives/Managers in Decision Making: Engage executives and managers in the decision-making process. Regular updates and collaboration ensure alignment with business goals and minimize unnecessary redesign sessions.
- Hand Over the Design and Start Development: Provide developers with all necessary assets, including fonts, colors, logos, prototypes, and CSS codes. This seamless handover ensures a smooth transition from design to development.
- Launch Your New App/Website: Celebrate the culmination of your redesign project by launching the modernized website/app with the new UI. Schedule the launch during low-traffic periods to minimize disruptions. Ensure thorough testing to eliminate broken links or other issues.
By following this systematic UI redesign process on how to redesign a website or app, you position your legacy app for improved user satisfaction, increased engagement, and better business outcomes.
How ModLogix Can Help
ModLogix, with 9+ years of experience and 100+ professionals, helps clients update their websites and apps for better user engagement and business outcomes using technologies like .NET, Rabbit MQ, and Visual FoxPro.
One success story involves Approved Admissions (AA), a cloud-based platform for healthcare facilities. Facing increasing demand, AA wanted to improve its patient verification process. With a user-tested prototype and redesigned UI/UX, ModLogix developed a web scraper to gather data from different electronic medical record (EMR) platforms. This led to 12.3 times faster reports, a 43% increase in customers, and handling 15,000 requests daily.
Conclusion
A strategic UI/UX redesign breathes new life into legacy apps, improving speed, user retention, and conversion rates. By following a systematic UX redesign process, evaluating current layouts, setting clear goals, conducting user research, and iterating designs based on feedback, companies can ensure their legacy apps are modernized to meet user expectations, drive engagement, and boost business outcomes.
