Jasper den Ouden3 min readRedesign done. The screens are calmer, and the client and the team are pleased. Then comes the question you hoped nobody would ask: is it actually better now?
We prefer to work with concrete goals. More conversion, fewer errors, shorter turnaround. We agree on them at the start and measure them at the end. But many products do not have those numbers. An internal system has no conversion. A portal people open once a month has no meaningful turnaround time. What is left is a discussion about taste, in which we say it feels calmer and someone else says the old one was fine too.
One questionnaire, twice
For that situation we use a standard questionnaire from the field: the User Experience Questionnaire, UEQ for short, developed by Martin Schrepp and colleagues. Twenty-six word pairs, each on a seven-point scale. Confusing versus clear, slow versus fast, boring versus exciting. It takes a user five minutes to fill in, and you do not have to explain anything.
The answers fall into six themes: how attractive the product looks, how clear it is, how efficiently you work with it, how much control you feel, how motivating it is and how novel. That last theme is the least important and the most tempting; a redesign always scores well on it, because everything is new. The themes to watch are clarity and efficiency.
We send the questionnaire to the people who use the product before the redesign. We design specifically for the themes that score low. And after launch we send the same questionnaire again.
What happens then
For a client portal for healthcare practices we did this earlier this year. The old portal scored middling on all six themes and negative on novelty. After the redesign the overall score came out almost twice as high. The biggest gains were on clarity and efficiency: nearly nine in ten users found the new portal easier to understand, three quarters found it faster to work in.
That changes the conversation. "We think it feels calmer" becomes "three quarters of your users find it faster to work in". There is a number, everyone in the room knows where it came from and the question of whether it got better is answered before anyone has to ask it.
Where to start
Send the questionnaire now, before you begin a redesign. It is the only moment you can still take the baseline. Twenty completed questionnaires are enough to see a pattern; fewer than that and it turns into noise. And keep it short: the questionnaire itself, not ten extra questions you also wanted to know. Those push the response rate down, and you need every response you can get.
We track whether your product meets the goals you set, with KPIs we choose together, and point out where the next change can have the most effect.
