Product redesign, first steps in a process

2008-10-14 Design Design

So we have started on a major product redesign at work and things are going well.

The product in question is the flagship product from our Swedish office, and the launch point and central resource for the many others here.

Starting a redesign is no simple process, after all the decision to do so usually comes from several sources not just the need to do it, but justifiable business reasoning.

The first thing we did was to look at the reasoning behind a redesign and what the goals for doing it are. We identified a list of major and minor reasons including:

Ease of use
New generation of APIs
Flexibility
Extendibility

I think took a very long look at what we had in the existing interface, identifying what was right and wrong with the current iteration.

Then I investigated what we actually needed to show and how the information broke down into component parts. It quickly was shown that we had three major areas.

Find
Display list of items
Display of a single item

And then I broke down the interactions that users may do on these items and lists, as well as the process used in getting there.

Of course this was all done on the whiteboard:

And some workflows:

There are many more items that we went through as well. But it seemed that the main issue was to solve this through a simpler navigation system – more of which to come in my next post.