What to observe before redesigning a digital experience
A redesign brief describes what an organization wants to change. Observation shows what is really happening. The two are rarely the same, and the difference is where the most useful design decisions come from.
What should you observe before a redesign?
Before redesigning a digital experience, observe how people actually use it in their real context: what they are trying to get done, where they hesitate, what workarounds they have built and what happens before and after they touch the screen. Then look at the organization behind the experience, because content, processes and ownership shape what any new design can achieve.
None of this replaces the brief. A brief is a starting point, written by people who know the business well. But it is usually written from inside the organization, and it describes the problem as the organization sees it. Observation adds the view from where the work happens.
Why not start from the brief and the analytics?
Both are valuable, and we read them carefully. Analytics can tell you where people leave a journey, which pages they visit and how often. A brief can tell you what the organization needs and what it has already tried.
Neither tells you why. A high exit rate on a form might mean the form is confusing, or that people found the answer they needed and left satisfied, or that they switched to the phone because they always do. You only find out by looking more closely.
This is the thinking behind a principle we return to often, sometimes called Genchi Genbutsu: go and see. Understand what happens where the work happens. It does not always mean fieldwork. Sometimes it is a screen-share with a customer, a morning with a support team or an hour reading through real enquiries. The point is first-hand evidence rather than assumptions passed along.
What are the most useful things to watch for?
In Define & Explore we try to keep observation focused. A long list of things to notice is less useful than a few that change decisions. These tend to matter most:
The goal behind the task
People rarely want to “use the website”. They want to compare two options, renew something before a deadline or check that a request went through. When you know the goal, you can judge whether each step helps or gets in the way.
Workarounds
Sticky notes, saved searches, spreadsheets kept alongside the system, a colleague who is always asked: workarounds are among the most honest signals available. Each one shows a need the current experience does not meet, and often a solution people have already tested.
Hesitation and repetition
Watch where people pause, scroll back, reread or ask someone. These moments are easy to miss in analytics and obvious in person. They often point to unclear wording, missing context or a step that appears in the wrong order.
The environment
Where and how is the experience used? On a phone between appointments, on a shared screen in a busy office, late in the evening after a long day? Lighting, noise, interruptions and time pressure all shape what good design looks like.
Handovers
Many experiences break not on a screen but between people: from a website to a call centre, from sales to operations, from one shift to the next. Notice what information is carried across, what is retyped and what is lost.
The words people use
Listen for the language customers and staff use naturally. If people say “my order” and the interface says “transaction history”, that small gap adds up across a whole journey.
Who should you observe?
More people than the brief usually names. The obvious audience is customers or end users, but the experience also depends on:
- The staff who support it, such as customer service, sales or operations, who hear the questions the interface fails to answer.
- The people who maintain it, including editors, administrators and developers, whose daily work decides whether content stays accurate.
- The people who make decisions from it, managers who rely on reports or dashboards produced by the system.
Each group sees a different part of the same experience. A redesign that works for one and ignores the others tends to move problems around rather than resolve them.
What do you do with what you observe?
Observation is only useful if it changes the next decision. We organize what we see into a small number of clear findings: what we observed, where, how often it seemed to occur and what we think it might mean. We keep observation and interpretation separate, because a pattern seen in a few sessions is a reason to look further, not yet a proven cause.
Those findings then shape the brief for Design & Develop. Sometimes they confirm the original direction. Sometimes they narrow it, or show that the most valuable change is in content, process or handovers rather than the interface itself.
Observation does not end at launch. In Optimize we return to the same questions with the new experience in place, because what people do with a design is the best evidence of whether it fits. That evidence leads back to Define & Explore, and the loop continues.
If you are planning a redesign and would like to understand the real context first, our approach page explains how we work, and you can tell us about it.