Kirmela / Guide 01

Before You Redesign.

Questions worth answering before committing significant time and investment to redesigning, replacing or rebuilding an important digital experience.

Before the brief

Redesign should follow understanding, not replace it.

A redesign can improve an experience. It can also reproduce the same problem in a newer interface if the organisation has misunderstood what is causing the difficulty.

Before deciding what the solution looks like, establish what the decision needs to be based on.

Seven questions

What should you know before redesign begins?

What are we actually seeing?

Describe the behaviour, outcome or difficulty without jumping to an explanation.

What do we know?

Identify the evidence that can genuinely be relied on.

What are we assuming?

Surface explanations that feel plausible but have not yet been demonstrated.

What else could explain it?

Look beyond the interface to the wider journey, process, context, accessibility and service.

What already works?

Understand what should be retained rather than treating everything old as something to replace.

What decision are we trying to make?

Be clear about what the evidence needs to help the organisation decide.

What do we still need to understand?

Identify the smallest important evidence gap that could materially change the direction.

Before moving on

You do not need perfect certainty.

The goal is enough understanding to make the next decision better.

If the remaining uncertainty is unlikely to change what you do, moving forward may be reasonable. If a major assumption could change the direction, investigate it before the solution hardens around it.

Explore the Before You Redesign workshop