When a product is not working, the first request is usually a redesign. New screens, a new look, a cleaner layout. Sometimes that helps. More often the screens were fine, and people were being lost in the gaps between them.
Map the whole path
A journey starts long before the first screen: an ad, a search result, a recommendation from a friend. It continues after the last one, with an email, a delivery, a support call. We map every step, including the ones outside the product, because a promise made in an ad and broken on the landing page is a design problem too.
Find where people leave
Analytics show where users drop out; they rarely show why. For that you need to watch real people try to complete the task. Five sessions are usually enough to find the biggest problems, and they are almost always less visual than expected: a confusing word, a missing piece of information, a step that asks for too much too soon.
Remove steps before polishing them
The best improvement to a step is often deleting it. Do you need that field? That confirmation screen? That account before checkout? Each step removed helps every user; a better-looking step helps only the ones who were going to finish anyway.
Then design the screens
Once the journey is right, interface design has a clear job. Each screen knows what it is for, what came before it and what should happen next. The work goes faster, and the result is easier to test, because there is an agreed path to test it against.
