Metrics to Measure the benefits of a design revamp for SMEs

To get ahead of the competition and gain more market share, design revamp for SMEs is becoming pivotal to strengthen business strategy and boost ROI.

Instagram – the seemingly humble photo-sharing app – shocked the world in 2016 by rolling out a new logo. The logo was redesigned to move away from the Polarized-style icon to a minimalist, modern-looking camera with a simple rainbow gradient background that screamed ‘less is more’.

But, that’s not all. The different color palette within the app was another major design change. Before the change, Insta’s token color was blue. Now, it’s black and white. The design change helped better the user experience by focusing entirely on the photos being posted by the users.

Even though Instagram is not an SME, the rebranding effort was still risky. However, it went down as one of the most inspiring and memorable redesign success stories. Presently, Instagram boasts more than 2.3 billion users and new features continue to be added – like the recent user-friendly redesign of Instagram Stories.

Other than rebranding and giving an app/website a fresh look and feel, the other reasons for undertaking redesigning of your app/website include – 

1. Competitor apps/websites:

Staying ahead of the competition is a key motivator for app/website design enhancement. If your competitors are rehashing their digital products to meet the new-age requirements, you cannot fall behind.

2. Losing popularity in the app stores (or search engines):

If the number of downloads of your app has gone down (or the number of visitors to your website), you know it is time to rework the design to rise in popularity again.

3. Trying to reach a new target audience:

If you are thinking of targeting a new segment of the audience, you have to redesign your digital product according to the latest trends. The new design ought to be inclusive of your existing and new target audience.

Whatever the reason for a design revamp for SMEs, you need to have quantifiable goals for your project so that redesign success can be measured.

To give you a head start, here are five metrics to measure the advantages of a design makeover.

1. Conversion rate

There can be so many things that you might want to achieve with a design revamp. But, most SMEs and marketers would agree that there’s a single metric that matters above all – the rate of conversion.

To measure conversions, you have to first decide what counts as a conversion – this means that you have to decide what you want your audience to do once they arrive at your website or find your app. Some of the common actions include signing up for a monthly newsletter, subscribing to the mailing list, contacting the company, making a purchase, and so on.

You have to give your redesign three months and then you can compare conversion rate data with the previous data.

One of the best ways to ensure that the redesign works is by studying the impediments that your audience was facing after they visited your website or download your app. Try to remove those obstacles and redesign to make your digital product more user-friendly.

For example, Bandwidth reported a 12% visitor-to-lead conversion uplift by redesigning its product page.

2. Bounce rate

Is the bounce rate high? If so, you need to thoroughly study the reason behind a high bounce rate – it might be related to speed, cluttered design, confusing UI, and even broken links from your social media pages like your Instagram URL.

Design revamp for SMEs would mean addressing those concerns and making your app/website more user-friendly, faster, and more visually appealing. 

Make sure to compare the bounce rate before and after the design revamp. If the bounce rate is low, it means that your redesign efforts have worked. This also means that you’ll be getting more visitors/downloads and more chances of converting them into loyal customers.

3. User engagement 

A high bounce rate is a sign of low user engagement. Also, if people are not taking the actions that you want them, the design is probably not impactful enough to drive the visitors to the end of the sales funnel. For better user engagement, you can implement redesign in the form of improving visual elements, refreshing content, enhancing navigation, integrating social media, and simplifying the user onboarding process.

As for applications, design revamp can also include introducing useful and new features, fixing bugs, and improving customer support.

If the number of visitors or downloads increases and people talks about your digital product across social media platforms, it is a sign of successful user engagement.

4. Average session duration

The average session duration can speak volumes of the success of your design revamp efforts. Redesigning should be a step toward making your products much more interactive for your target audience. The aim is to make them  stick around to explore. Do away with irrelevant content and navigate your audience toward what they are searching for. Improve the visual layout so that it is attractive. Give them reasons to stick around and measure the time that they spend on your app or website in a day. Compare this data and you will know if you’ve hit jackpot with your design revamp project.

5. ROI

Whether your design revamp project was a success would come down to figuring out the loss that you would’ve incurred if you hadn’t gone ahead with the redesign. If the number of your visitors and downloads were constantly on the downhill and the bounce rate was at an all-time high; it meant that you had to take a step to rectify the reasons why your audience is failing to connect with your app/website. Redesigns based on proper research and competitor analysis end up fetching a high ROI because the audience appreciates the effort.

Conclusion

Shaking things up once in a while is a good way to grab attention and steal the limelight. That’s exactly the kind of effect that redesigns have on the end-users. They’re instantly attracted to change. If the design revamp for SMEs is well-researched, it can rectify the initial shortcomings, and bring you significant success.

If you need any help understanding how redesign works, you can reach out to Divami. Our portfolio showcases the expertise of our UX design experts.