Steve Huffman warns that redesigning your product usually fails because you're rewriting the same habits that created the original. Twitch's mobile redesign boosted engagement 35-40%, but that's rare. Iterate with a new MVP instead of an all-at-once rewrite.
Questions this video answers
"probably half a dozen times each."
"like 35, 40% per customer when we launched it."
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When you're talking about redesigning your products.
You'Re probably in trouble because whatever habits led you to build a product your customers don't like, if you haven't addressed those habits, you're probably going to build another product your customers don't like. I've been through lots of rewrites. At Hipmunk, we rewrote our flight and hotels probably half a dozen times each. At Reddit, we rewrote the tech a bunch of times, and we're redoing the UI and UX now with better habits and better data. And so you want to make sure that you know something new. But honestly, if you're in that situation, I would also go through another mental exercise of, okay, what's the new mvp? It comes up in tech a lot, right? The second system syndrome. The same thing happens in the product where you're like, all right, I've got this vision. I'm going to fix all of the mistakes at once and it's going to be perfect. That product never ships. It never ships. So can you iterate your way there? Can you just start from scratch with an MVP and build it back up? Those are much more likely to actually get you somewhere, but they're also harder to do and requires a little bit more discipline.
So I also went through a bunch of redesigns, big redesigns. You have to rebuild the whole product. They've been mixed, actually. We've had some that were super successful. Twitch did a big redesign of our mobile app maybe three years ago, and that increased engagement by like 35, 40% per customer when we launched it.
It's huge.
Changes that make that big of an impact are actually really rare. We got some insights as to what things should be presented at the top level of the nav, and we redid the navigation to present those things at the top level instead of burying them three clicks deep. Most of the time. When I see people doing a big redesign, it's because they've fallen into this trap that engineers and product managers often fall into, which is, oh, we have to fix these eight things. Let's just fix them all at once. It'll be easier. That's wrong. You should just fix them each one at a time, individually. You'll get there way faster, one change at a time than you will in a big rewrite. Big rewrite for a really early stage startup is almost equivalent to pivoting the company. And I just would generally advise against it.
It's this weird sort of programmer product procrastination. If I don't know what to do. Therefore, I'm going to invent this big project to work on. We don't need to use that library.
