4 things I learned by re-designing a landing page
A while back I re-designed a landing page and had major learnings while doing so. This blog/article is where I share 4 major learnings. Let’s get to it.
1. Get to know why are you doing the re-design/design
When you’re asked to redesign a landing page, whether it’s from your PM, stakeholders, or if you’re freelancing then clients, always understand the reason behind it. It could be because something isn’t working or there’s a high drop-off rate. Knowing the why, the problem is crucial for designers.
You can ask questions to your PM’s / stakeholders / Clients like|
Why are we doing the re-design?
What is not working in the current page?
What do you want to get out of the re-design?
What is the end goal of the re-design?
What numbers exactly are you trying to target here? Is it conversions, drop-offs etc and go you have a number in mind that you want to achieve. Eg. Current conversion-4%, Aimed Conversion with the re-design-6.5%.
When you ask these questions, things really start to get clear from your end and from the business’s end as well. By asking these questions we are setting the goal for the re-design and the discussions, the thinking & design process gets a lot of help when we know what are we trying to achieve.
2. Who are you doing it for?
Once we get some requirement where we have to re-design a website / landing page, some of us might directly start thinking of the juicy stuff where we change the fonts and colors and the layout and make it look real nice. That’s gonna do it right? Well, not quite. I did the same mistake and I’m here to tell you to not repeat what I did. Don’t jump to juicy stuff before you figure out why are you doing this and who you are doing this for.
I’ll explain you with an example. Maybe the current website which is a real estate selling company’s website has good old roboto as their typeface and you decide to crisp it up a little with Plus Jakarta.
What could happen is loss of business because we didn’t consider the target group of the website which would majorly be people in their 40’s to 60’s, 70’s even 80’s. They might have readability issues and roboto’s x height is more than plus jakarta sans x height making it less readable compared to roboto. (I’m not saying Plus Jakarta Sans is a bad typeface, I love her) So if they don’t read properly obviously they are not going to spend time on the website and switch to a different firm.
The point that I’m trying to make is changing like a simple font can bring down an empire so we have to take those decisions carefully. That’s why knowing our target audience becomes super important. When we know who we’re designing for, the design decision we take, we take keeping them in mind and thus the design process, the discussions within team, with the business stakeholders become much easier.
How do we get this data? The target audience? Generally the business knows who their target audience is so you can simply ask the product managers or the business stakeholders / clients. You can even ask for in depth target audience distribution based on factors like age, gender, demographics (like cities, tier 1, 2, 3 etc).
3. Rectangle helps you untangle
Once you know the answer to why and for who and you have done your research as well. Now comes the juicy part right? Still no. Once you know what you have to do, try to create it using the good old grey rectangles. Wireframes.
Now don’t take me literally here and create wireframes using rectangles for the sake of doing it. What do I mean by “for the sake of doing it”? Wireframes are there to help us think, create and iterate quickly and repeat this process over and over quickly without sticking to one idea. When you invest time in one idea, building it using colors and good typefaces, higher the chances of you getting attached to the idea which would not help us in the exploration stages at least.
So the idea here is to create rough, create quick which helps us to get some feedback and iterate on it, discuss on it. So if you’re ok with a pencil & paper wireframe, please go ahead and do it. Nobody in the whole industry would come at you saying why isn’t it a figma rectangles wireframe?
Discuss over the pencil, paper or pixel rectangles doesn’t matter. The point here is to discuss the flow, the hierarchy of information, the ideas that you have in mind, the problem that you’re solving and how are you approaching it, the point here is to discuss that and get alignment so that everyone is on the same page.
If you do it like this, you’ll end up saving a ton of time and discussions which would have been there if you directly went to them with the final UI and they would have tons of feedbacks and misalignment. And trust me, you don’t wanna be there. Feedbacks are good and I appreciate them but getting feedbacks on the foundation front after you are already done with your ui is not a good thing. So to avoid that, please untangle with the rectangles.
4. There’s no failing, only learning
As cliche as it sounds, it’s true. If things don’t work out for one project, that doesn’t mean you failed. Failure has a lot of things to teach us. If you see it as a opportunity to learn and grow and improve, you didn’t fail, you became a better version of yourself because of it.
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These are some of the learnings I had so thought of sharing it here. I understand some of the pointers are very common but when I started, I made a mistake of overlooking these fundamentals which didn’t turn out that good. I’m sharing these learnings with y’all hoping you wouldn’t do the same mistake of overlooking them. Hopefully, it would be helpful to someone and you might not have to do the same mistakes to get these learnings.
You can connect with me on Twitter, or Linked-in, or you can mail me at piyushux@gmail.com for work-related opportunities. Thank you :)
