Article

Your Website Is Not a Design Problem

Most redesign briefs start in the same place. The website looks tired, and someone has been asked to fix it.

The instructions that follow are usually specific. A cleaner homepage. A modern colour palette. Fewer clicks to browse. Bigger buttons. It reads like a wish list for how the site should look, not an explanation of why it isn’t working.

That’s an understandable place to start. A website is the part everyone sees, so it’s the part everyone wants to change. But the evidence doesn’t support the assumption behind it.

Walmart learned a version of this the expensive way, in its physical stores rather than online. Starting in 2008, the retailer rolled out a major redesign of its shop floors under a programme called Project Impact: wider aisles, roughly 15% of products removed from shelves, a calmer and more premium feel. Customers had said, when asked, that they wanted a tidier store. And here is the detail that makes the story worth telling: after the remodels, customer satisfaction scores at those stores rose sharply. Shoppers rated the new stores higher. They also bought less in them. Sales began falling within months of the wider rollout and kept falling, quarter after quarter, until the company reversed course and began restocking hundreds of the items it had removed.

The store looked better. Customers said they preferred it. It sold less. Shoppers hadn’t come for a calmer aisle. They’d come to find what they needed, quickly and at a price they trusted, and the redesign had quietly made that harder.

A new look, the same problem

This is the pattern behind most disappointing redesigns, on shop floors and on websites alike. Appearance changes. The underlying problem doesn’t.

Looking better and working better are not the same project, even though they’re often bought as one. A visitor doesn’t leave a website because the layout is dated. They leave because they couldn’t find what they came for, didn’t trust what they were reading, or weren’t sure what to do next. None of that gets fixed by a new coat of paint, because none of it was caused by the old one.

Start with who, not what

Before any design decision gets made, there’s a more basic question to answer: who is this website actually for, and what are they trying to do when they arrive?

Not “who do we want to attract” in the abstract, but the specific people who show up today: what they already know, what they’re unsure about, what would make them trust the business enough to act.

We see how rarely this question gets asked. A pattern we’ve encountered more than once: a professional services firm comes to us convinced its site needs a visual overhaul, because enquiries have slowed and the site is the obvious suspect. Then we sit with the people who actually field those enquiries, and a different picture emerges. Prospects arrive at the site already interested, referred by someone or returning from a pitch. What they’re looking for is not a first impression. It’s confirmation. Evidence of work like theirs, a sense of who they’d be dealing with, a reason to feel safe recommending the firm internally. The old site buried all of that three clicks deep under a beautiful homepage. No palette change was going to fix it, because colour was never the reason people hesitated.

Most businesses can describe their customers in general terms. Far fewer can describe, in detail, what those customers need from the website itself: the questions they arrive with, the reassurance they’re looking for, the exact point where they usually give up. That understanding has to come first, because everything that follows depends on it.

Where experience and positioning come in

Once there is clarity on who the website is for, two things take shape together: the experience, which is how easy the site is to use, and the brand’s positioning, which defines what the business stands for.

These aren’t separate workstreams that happen to sit near each other. They shape one another. A business with a clear position, a clear sense of what it does differently and for whom, tends to produce a website that reads as confident and easy to follow, because there’s a clear story to build the experience around. A business without that clarity tends to produce a website that feels busy or uncertain, however modern the design, because there’s no clear story to guide the decisions.

Better, not just different

There’s a temptation, once a business decides its website needs work, to focus on standing out. A bolder look. Something visitors haven’t seen from a competitor. It’s a reasonable instinct, but it aims at the wrong target.

The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

Jony Ive, best known for his work at Apple Inc.

A website can look unlike anything a competitor has built and still fail to serve the person using it. Being different is a visual decision. Being better means understanding what your customers actually need, and building something that gets them there with less effort than anywhere else they could go. That’s a much harder problem, and it’s the one worth solving.

Function, experience and look: one product, not three choices

None of this means appearance doesn’t matter. It does. But it’s the last piece to fall into place, not the first.

Think of the three as doing different jobs. Function earns trust: the site works, the information is there, nothing is broken. Experience maintains momentum: the visitor keeps moving without having to stop and figure things out. Appearance confirms authority: the polish tells them they’re dealing with a serious business. A website that works but looks careless will lose trust. A website that looks polished but fails to function will lose it faster. Remove any one of the three and the other two have to work much harder.

A simple self-assessment: is your website problem strategic or aesthetic?

Before commissioning a redesign, it’s worth being honest about which problem you’re actually solving. A few questions to sit with:

• Can you describe, in one sentence, what a first-time visitor should do on your site, and does your homepage make that obvious within a few seconds?

• When someone leaves without acting, do you know why, or only that they left?

• If a competitor’s site looked identical to yours tomorrow, would customers still choose you, and could you say what for?

• Has anyone on your team spoken to an actual customer about their experience on the site in the last few months, or has feedback come only from internal opinion?

• Is the request for a redesign coming from evidence that something isn’t working, or from a feeling that it looks old?

If most of your answers point to uncertainty rather than the site’s appearance, the problem probably isn’t a design one. It’s a clarity one, and no visual refresh will resolve it.

Because a redesign was never really the goal. Understanding your customer well enough to serve them better than anyone else can was always the point. The look just has to catch up to that.

So Interactive is a digital experience design agency working with mid-to-large enterprises across South Africa and beyond. We design experiences that solve real problems for real users and deliver measurable results for the businesses behind them.