Why redesign your product?; and making videos
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Hello! Jason Cohen questions the value of a redesign of a mature product: It seems obvious to me that if your software product has the design standards of, say, 2005, you’ll struggle to get new customers. Without a doubt, you need to redesign. But is this really the case? Does the data back this up? I’ve investigated this a little, and found bold claims, but no high quality data. It’s not exactly something you can A/B test in isolation. We covered this topic in Kill the HiPPO Chapter 4: Cupholders vs CarPlay At the end of 2023 [Less Annoying CRM] did a major visual product redesign.
Existing customers had been perfectly happy with the current design. But to prospective ones, the product looked outdated and unmaintained. They would submit contact forms asking: "Are you still working on this? This doesn't look like it's been touched since 2015."
This is one of the more convincing arguments I’ve heard for a redesign—prospective customers feeling like it is an abandoned product. The big problem with a redesign—and one we’ve all suffered from as end users—is that it annoys and frustrates your existing customers, especially the ones who use your product the most. They have muscle memory for the old design, they have workflows and standard operating procedures based on it. And one day, suddenly—perhaps when they are tired and busy and needing to get something done with your app in a hurry—they find that you’ve moved everything around on them. Tyler, co-founder of Less Annoying CRM experienced this: Feedback from his change-averse customer base was mixed. Two years have passed since the redesign, and Tyler continues to receive complaints about it. My own product, Feature Upvote, looked like it was designed by a developer for the first 3 or 4 years - because it was! Nevertheless, in those early years we got some very design-conscious customers. Eventually I hired a professional designer to redesign it. It had zero noticeable impact on our sales metrics. MRR growth, churn, # of support tickets - none of these showed any difference before and after. My gut feeling these days is to redesign only if:
I’m recording some short videos to promote Kill the HiPPOAfter I finish writing this newsletter, I’ll be recording six short videos, each about one minute long and covering a different aspect of the book. I plan to make 24 of these videos over the coming weeks. I’ll be publishing them on LinkedIn and YouTube, about twice a week. Will this work? Or is this merely pushing the “get awareness” problem one level further away from the book? Who knows! I’ll let you know when I find out. Until next time, keep making great software. Steve McLeod PS: If you’ve bought Kill the HiPPO, have you written a review yet? |