Refreshing Mobile Applications: How to Know When a Mobile App Redesign is Necessary?

When it comes to mobile applications, the design that you launch with will become obsolete eventually. This is because of design preference and what is considered efficient, clean, and functional changes as your users’ tastes and needs change. This is why we’ve seen major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram get completely facelifts in their design. But, how do you know when a mobile app redesign is necessary, and if it is, how do you go about approaching the issue?

What Benefits Come From a Good App Redesign?

When a small business redesigns their mobile app and it is done right, with user feedback taken into account, you will see a whole host of benefits. This includes happier customers, increased sales, and increased brand exposure that brings about more loyal customers.

• When you give your mobile app a redesign to solve customer pain points, you show them that you are willing to invest in their experience and that you take their feedback seriously. This generates satisfaction and increases conversions.

• An up to date design that is intuitive, modern, and easy to use brings in new customers that may have passed on your mobile app in the past due to aesthetic and functional tastes. A beautiful app design encourages new customers to jump on board.

• A timely response to customer feedback about your Android or IOS app builds a strong business to customer relationship. This allows customers to feel heard and, in turn, generates loyalty to your brand.

How Do You Know When It Is Time for a Mobile App Redesign?

To help you figure out whether now is the right time to complete a redesign for your mobile app, let’s take a look at some key areas.

1. Your Users Complain. When going through your customer feedback emails, reviews, and support tickets, take a look at what the complaints are about. If you are getting negative reviews on the Android or IOS app store from new users and refreshed reviews from old users, then there’s an issue going on. Also highlight definite problems that customers are laying out for you, pay attention to angry comments on social media, and if your app store rating falls below a 3 or 4-star, this is a good indication.

2. Conversion Rates Are Low. If your user base is unenthusiastic about using the mobile app, sales are extremely low, and you’re seeing very weak growth, then your mobile app needs a redesign. This could be because your design is boring or unengaging, the registration process is too time-consuming, or you don’t have enough interactive elements that keep your user base from logging in every day.

3. Company Has Rebranded. Your mobile app’s design needs to be consistent with your brand’s aesthetic design, voice, and style. If you are rebranding your company, then a new mobile app design needs to be created to match. If you are rebranding the company to launch new products, make sure your mobile app also matches your new products as well. You want everything under one design, one style, and one voice.

4. You Are Changing Your Target Audience. If your small business is changing tactics and your audience along with it, then you need to prepare a new product vision and marketing strategy that includes changes to your app’s design.

What Steps Do I Need to Take to Complete A Mobile App Redesign?

Once you know that it is time to complete a mobile app redesign, you will need some clear steps to follow in order for the new design to be a success. Here are 7 steps you should take.

1. Take a Look at Your Analytics. These are key measurements that are going to tell you a lot about your app’s pain points. Make sure you are looking at

• Goals. Are your goals being hit? Take a look at your conversions & micro-conversions. If the milestones associated with these are not being hit, your UX/UI is probably to blame.

• Activation Rate. How many of your users complete the onboarding process? Compare this with the number of downloads to see how many people are using the app after onboarding is complete.

• Drop-Off Rate. Has there been a sudden drop-off of your user base? Find out why they are leaving the app.

• Active Users. Measure your daily active users and monthly active users. Are these numbers decreasing compared to previous months? If so, look at user satisfaction.

2. Look at User Feedback. Directly look at what your user base is telling you. There are 3 ways you can do this, either through reviews on the Android or IOS app store, in-app surveys, or through social media pages.

• App Store Reviews. Do a complete user review analysis to see how dissatisfied
  users are, what problems they pointed out, and which key areas your app is failing in. Do this by sorting through relevant reviews, recent reviews, or reviews based on ratings.

• In-App Surveys. Collect user feedback by sending in-app surveys to them.

  • You can provide a short announcement with a link to a survey that they can fill out. There are plenty of online services that offer survey creation.

  • If your mobile app requires users to register with an email, you can use email to ask for feedback. Just make sure that your email blast has a strong subject line and a friendly email copy.

  • You can use an in-app pop-up. Be careful with this though, you want something that is easy to interact with and is short. A lot of users don’t like it when their user experience is interrupted, so if you already have a lot of in-app pop-ups, you may want to avoid this one.

• Social Media. Monitor your social media pages for your mobile app and see what type of feedback is being left. Pull all of this feedback together and do another feedback analysis and see if it correlates with your Android & IOS app review
  feedback.

3. Research Your Competitors. Definitely download your competitors’ apps and check out their user-experience and overall design. Yes, they may have more advanced features or maybe way ahead in their design, but this gives you a chance to learn from them and become inspired. This allows you to put your own spin on features that would work well in your own app and help you learn from your competitors’ mistakes so that you gain an edge.

4. Understand Your Customers’ Journey. Create a customer journey map to get a visual idea of how customers will flow through your app. This will help you define bottlenecks, convoluted areas, and regions of the app where conversions fail because of XYZ pain points. You want a simple, short, and smooth flow through the mobile app.

5. List Out Improvements. With an understanding of your users’ journey, list out which parts of it need improvements. Then list out the pain points that need to be solved with the design. For instance, if users often complain about not being able to switch from one area of the app to another, you may need to clean up your navigation.

6. Complete the Redesign. Now that you’ve gone through all of the steps above, you can get to the fun part – the redesign!

• Make sure that the design pattern will solve the pain points you’ve highlighted. If you have to create an entire new design pattern, then that’s okay!

• Once you have your design pattern, compare it with others that solve similar problems to ensure you are on the right track.

• Look at your design pattern and see how many of your competitors’ are using it. Does it really work for them?

• Create wireframes. Then create the high-fidelity design.

• Create an app prototype with the design and test it.

7. Test & Test Again. Before rolling out the updates to your mobile app, do some beta testing with a limited pool of people. This will help you generate feedback to make sure that everything is working as it should within the new design. If you get back some feedback that is less than stellar, this allows you to make the necessary changes before you globally release it to your entire user base. Always test and test again!

When it comes to implementing the changes for your app redesign, do it slowly. Users tend to not like change, so make sure you are engaging with them every step of the way. Collect new feedback as the changes get implemented and make sure you explain why the changes are taking place.