Which is better, sweeping changes or incremental improvements?

Information Architects are often asked to provide a completely new architecture and design solution for their clients' digital user experiences. In some cases, however, the client may have been better served by making a few tweaks, or optimizing a key page. In fact, the IA and client's sense of satisfaction is too often tied to the magnitude of the change, not the positive impact of the change. The following are reasons why incremental change may be better than sweeping change, when redesigning a client's digital user experience:

1. Don't try to solve too many issues at once. Information Architects can generally eyeball a web site or screen interface and come up with a thousand things wrong with the design. In fact, we have a name for this type of analysis. It is called "heuristic evaluation." But, just because there are a thousand things that can be corrected, it doesn't mean that they need to be corrected all at once. Sometimes, tackling a large quantity of enhancements reduces the likelihood that issues will be prioritized and planned properly. Going through the effort of prioritizing enhancements will force IAs and clients to plan for enhancement phases, measurement of enhancements, as well as subsequent phases, based on a sensible, product road map.  

2. Only invest in Design improvements that achieve identified objectives. Most organizations require a justification of investment when making changes to an existing digital experience or web site. If an enhancement cannot be mapped back to a measurable business requirement or objective, it may not be worth investing money to change. Go through the effort of identifying all proposed enhancements and map each one to a measurable goal for the business. 

3. Don't try to fix what isn't broken. Sometimes, as Information Designers, we react emotionally to trendy new interface design patterns. Unfortunately, not everything new works better than a tried-and-true, conventional interface element. Be sure to measure the performance of interfaces that you propose to change, prior to changing them. Conduct a usability test to see which design pattern is more intuitive. 

4. Deploy a manageable set of enhancements at a time. QA managers will tell you that it is easier to perform quality assurance on a smaller set of features per deployment. New enhancements often cause new issues to old code.  

5. Don't disorient your users by making sweeping changes at once. It is a fact, that good usability comes as a result of repeated usage. While change is sometimes needed, it can be disorienting for repeat users if an entire system changes overnight. It is true, that usage of a newly designed web site drops immediately after a redesign. Hopefully, the numbers climb back up after users become more familiar with new interfaces.