(This article was an April Fool’s hoax and does not contain real design recommendations.)

One myth in the world of user experience is that users hate change. The basis of this argument is that users don’t like to learn new things. For existing users of your product, changing the interface causes them to relearn how to use it, which takes time and effort. This argument assumes that users’ time and effort are wasted and fails to acknowledge an inherent human need: to learn and adapt. During the Paleolithic Era, our cavemen and cavewomen ancestors sought out new experiences and adapted to many new scenarios. Without their knowledge and adaptation skills, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

The reality is users love change and it is our responsibility as designers to provide them with experiences that allow them to learn and adapt. The best way to fulfil these needs is by regularly releasing major product redesigns. In what follows, we discuss benefits of frequent major redesigns, how often you should redesign, and what areas to change.

Benefits of Frequent Major Redesigns

From a customer’s perspective, frequent major interface redesigns are beneficial because they:

  • Keep the interface fun and exciting, preventing users from getting bored using the same system repeatedly
  • Present new opportunities for users to learn
  • Enable users to adapt to a new setting
  • Encourage users to slow down and pay attention, which reduces the likelihood they will make an error or slip

From an organizational standpoint, frequent major redesigns are useful because:

  • They reduce the amount of UX debt since the timelines are tight, leaving little space for testing and more time for implementation.
  • Team budgets get fully used. As UX has become more understood by leadership, team budgets have expanded, often leaving teams with excess and little guidance on how to use it.

As noted, the benefits of frequent major redesigns are vast, from both the user and business perspective.

How Frequently Should We Redesign?

How often to release these redesigns is dependent on how frequently users access your system. For example, if users use your product daily, you'll want to change the design at least every two weeks otherwise users will learn the interface, but their adaptation skills will suffer. On the other hand, if users access your product weekly, you’ll want to release a major redesign every 1–2 months — since learning will take place over a longer period of time.

What Should We Redesign?

Major redesigns should target visual, content, layout, navigation, and interaction design. Consistently reorganizing your page layout, navigation, and content fulfills an innate human desire to search for information. Additionally, changes to visual and interaction designs cause users to adapt to the interface. Next, we’ll share ideas and guidance for changing your interface design.

Change UI Placement to Increase Discoverability

One of the main problems in UX design is how users discover new features — or even old features that they haven’t been using. Frequent UI changes are one of the best ways of enhancing discoverability: when old features are moved to a new place in the UI, people have to look for them, rather than proceed on autopilot through their tasks. This fulfils a human need to search for information.

Searching for information can excite users. For example, looking for a familiar item that was moved to a new location can be a delightful challenge. Perhaps that information used to be accessible from the homepage, but now users have to dig through several submenus before locating the new placement — how fun! Moving frequently used features or information encourages users to search through a lot of stuff. In turn, they will find items they were looking for and also discover new features.

Use Easter Eggs and Gamification to Create a Sense of Excitement

Easter eggs, a concept highly used in gaming, define an unexpected occurrence in a system. Though common in video games, this concept is sometimes encountered in other consumer products. As designers, we can use Easter eggs to create a sense of excitement and encourage exploration in our interfaces, and the more the better! For example, when you search ‘do a barrel roll’ in Google Search, users experience an Easter egg where the page spins, simulating a barrel roll.

Google search page spins like a barrel roll
When users search ‘do a barrel roll’ in Google Search, the page simulates a barrel roll by spinning.

Another type of Easter egg could involve removing labels from interaction targets. For example, instead of a traditional navigation, you could have a set of colorful rectangles with no labels. This design would get users to click on every single element to discover the category they’re looking for. For a bonus, you could randomly change what category goes with what rectangle. Or, even better, you may consider showing a solid continuous bar without navigation labels. Users will love clicking randomly inside that bar to discover categories.

NN/g homepage with multicolored navigation elements and no labels
Multicolored navigation elements without labels present a fun opportunity to explore a site.
NN/g homepage with a single navigation bar and no labels
Removing navigation labels from a single navigation bar encourages users to click around until they hit a target.

Easter eggs are an instance of gamification. There is endless inspiration that can be used from that domain. For instance, you may consider asking people to solve a puzzle before accessing a page and vary the puzzle every day. Such fun, unexpected interactions increase user excitement.  Using the same system repeatedly can cause users to get bored and seek change. Keep users interested in your interface by hiding Easter eggs and other small game-like elements throughout (and frequently changing their placement or design) so users never get bored.

Adopt Trendy Design Solutions to Show Innovation

Our work on emerging patterns in interface design has repeatedly found fads and fashions in design. This is particularly true for website design, but fashion exists in all areas of user experience.

With each redesign, you have the opportunity to embrace emerging fads and fashions. The more frequent the redesign, the more cutting-edge your design can be. Yes, our user research reveals that many design fads are bad for usability, but with frequent change you can get rid of a bad fad in no time. If, for example, your analytics show a 10% drop in conversions after adopting a design fad, you can try a new fad next week. Keep the mantra “Fail fast and fail cheap” in mind, because when you consistently alter your design, you’ll identify failures quickly and the impact will be minimum (as long as you move fast enough).

The most important aspect of being a fast mover in adopting design fashion is an increased positive emotional impact of your design. According to Don Norman’s 3-level model of emotional design, the reflective level concerns what the design says about you and how people think about the design. A fashionable design clearly boosts these reflective feelings, since users will feel part of the design avantgarde as they’re using your new design patterns that they have never seen anywhere else on the web.

Rewrite for Change

Content also benefits from frequent change. No need to limit yourself to a single writing style when we have 4 dimensions of tone of voice that can be varied in every rewrite to cater to a new audience each time. In fact, on this very date 7 years ago, we published very, very useful guidelines for how to mix up your digital content, and since usability guidelines don’t tend to change, we still refer you to that article.

Adjust Your Color Palette Regularly to Make Everyone Happy

Color is one of the key elements in making designs look good. But unfortunately, different users have different favorite colors, and stakeholders have many favorite colors too, considering how often they request color changes. Furthermore, we know from user research on customization that this conundrum can’t be resolved by simply allowing users access to a color picker — since people rarely bother to change system defaults.

Luckily, frequent design changes allow you to satisfy everybody. Aim to pick a different color every time you touch anything in the UI. Sooner or later, you’re going to give any individual user their favorite color and make them feel special. Instant customer loyalty, reinforced by the user’s strengthened desire to revisit your site often to see when their favorite color comes up again. (Even more revisits can be ensured through operant conditioning by changing colors randomly.)

What if We Can’t Release Major Redesigns Often?

Small changes are also OK. The bigger the UI changes, the bigger the impact on users. However, it’s always been a Nielsen Norman Group hallmark that we offer advice for discount usability to help teams with limited UX budgets. In research, we say, ‘Something is better than nothing,’ and this applies to design change as well.

If you can’t release a complete overhaul of your design every week or every month, don’t despair. Smaller changes can achieve many of the positive effects we’ve outlined in this article.

However, if you’re limited in the amount of change, you will need to be strategic about your changes to achieve the highest possible impact. For example, if you can only move one feature to a new IA location, you should pick the most-frequently used command and place it in the least-frequently used location. This way, you maximize the users’ learning opportunities as they go hunting for it. Also, you will grant your users a particularly strong pang of happy behavioral emotions (referring back to Don Norman’s 3-level model of emotional design) when they finally solve such a hard findability challenge.

Conclusion

Users love change because it fulfils a human need to consistently learn and adapt to their environment. Major redesigns are also beneficial for product teams, as these efforts ensure organizational budgets are well allocated and UX debt is reduced. As a digital product team, aim to release a major redesign every 2–6 weeks. If you fail to do so, you risk providing a monotonous experience and underutilized team resources.

(And by the way: Happy April Fool's Day.)