Design debt accounts for a poor user experience of your business apps. Therefore, addressing UI/UX design issues before they could pan out some grave concerns, like affecting your app’s user experience is necessary. This is where the UI/UX app modernization approach steps in.
Understanding UI/UX Design Issues
UI/UX design issues happen due to several factors, including;
- Inefficient architecture
- Lack of testing
- Design debt
A poor user experience on an app could be the root cause of design debt, a concept built on technical debt that impacts the integrity of an app’s user experience.
Therefore, organizations must take a careful look at the UI/UX of existing applications and identify design issues before modernizing them.
UI/UX App Modernization – Why Is It Needed For Business Applications?
The need for UI/UX modernization stems from how businesses require it to stay ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly changing technology landscape.
Organizations not keeping up with the latest interface and user experience trends are more likely to fall prey to sliding down on popularity rank and fading into oblivion amidst growing competition in the business market.
According to Gartner, customer experience (CX) is an emerging marketing battlefront, driving 81% of businesses to be competitive. In another report, 74% of companies upvote user experience as a key factor in improving sales and conversions.
These stats vindicate the viability of an efficient user interface as a building block for driving success to a business of any scale.
A pictorial insight into different aspects of UX/UX modernization
Also Read: Design Thinking for Business Growth with Innovation
A modernized UI/UX ensures that both design and tech debts are reduced, improving user experience on your business app. Moreover, it leads to better user engagement, satisfaction, and improved customer loyalty, coupled with increased sales and revenue for the business.
Benefits of UI/UX App Modernization For Businesses
Bringing Unique Changes To Customer Demand
- Leveraging application modernization helps businesses dole out highly personalized experiences to customers
- Allows businesses to interact with users based on parameters, like time, location, and preferences
- It drives a unique shift from traditional personalization to a predictive approach to fulfill customers’ expectations based on their behavioral patterns
Improved Data Security
- Mitigates risks, like credential theft and data security. This involves the UX design team anticipating such risks and deploying elements from the front end.
- Allows businesses to have systems with compatible architecture with security integrations. It improves data security significantly.
Higher Conversions With Enhanced Customer Experience
- With decoupling service, UI/UX modernization makes your systems resilient against risks in various aspects of customer journey, like onboarding, navigation, transaction, etc.
- A well-developed UI fosters improved website traffic by 200% and conversions by 400%. Therefore, a better UI causes increased sales
- Helps businesses expand their customer base amidst increasing competition
Apart from the above benefits, UI/UX modernization drives advantages, such as a reduction in support costs, improved accessibility, better engagement, and a competitive advantage for your business.
Learn More: Build UX Product Vision as a Designer
When To Seek UI/UX App Modernization?
- When you continuously receive user feedback complaining about poor navigation, problems in completing tasks, or not being happy with the overall performance of the app
- When you see a measured decline in user engagement metrics, in terms of bounce rate, session duration, and conversion rates
- If the UI of your app looks a tad outdated and lacks a cohesive visual style
- When you see your app doesn’t have responsive design according to modern design principles
- When you observe compatibility issues of your app with different devices
- Problems, such as slow loading times, abrupt crashes, or laggy interactions also require UI/UX app modernization
Know More: Infuse Design Thinking in Software Development
What Makes UI/UX App Modernization Challenging?
Legacy Code
Implementing UX/UX modernization in businesses that have been using legacy systems for years is challenging. That’s because the code of these legacy apps and systems requires testing and upgrades to ensure its compatibility with modern design elements. Bottom line – it is a very complex and time-consuming process.
Obsolete Design
Dealing with outdated design elements is one of the challenges in UI/UX modernization, considering they are difficult to change based on the current design requirements to satisfy existing users.
Highly Expensive
Costs vary when it comes to redesigning and rearchitecting UI; from deploying additional experts to investing in new tools or technologies.
Moreover, the costs involved in development and deployment also inflate overall UI/UX modernization costs, aside from making it a resource-intensive process. In addition, UI/UX modernization costs and how far they can vary depending on the type and complexity of UI features.
Technically, it would range from $15,000 to $75,000 and more, based on factors, such as key features, target audience, number of screens to scale the UI, necessary upgrades, etc.
Team Efforts Not In Alignment
One of the biggest challenges in UI/UX modernization is that cross-departmental team efforts are not in alignment. To say otherwise, teams are not exerting collaborations in alignment with one another at different stages of UI/UX modernization processes. The teams should work with a shared understanding or common goal about what UX will be after it is modernized.
Technical Debt
It defines numerous short-term solutions and make-do modules clustered together to the point of being obsolete over time. This poses challenges to the UX/UX modernization process, making it time-consuming when your legacy apps are replete with tech debt.
Microscopic Monitoring
Modernizing UX involves myriad tasks, making it quite a complex process for your design teams. Each process requires a minute level of monitoring to supervise the progress of UX modernization. It is challenging because it extends the time for the discovery phase to identify which areas in UX must be revamped.
Read More: Prototyping Tools for UI/UX Designer
UI/UX App Modernization Best Practices – How To Get Started With Modernizing UI/UX
Get A Clear Understanding Of Each Application
- Understand each application and its dependencies
- Learn how each app performs in its given environment and its operation in different conditions
- Understand how each app integrates with other systems in the ecosystem
Leverage Design Thinking
- It is an iterative process to gather an understanding of user requirements, and UI/UX gaps, build futuristic solutions, and test designs
- You can create user experiences solving problem areas of target audiences
- Improves conversion rates
Identify Apps To Be Modernized
- Once you’ve understood each app, prioritize those apps that you want to be modernized.
- Also, include the apps to be modernized at a later stage
- Identify and understand risks associated with app modernization
- Choose the approach best suited to each app modernization
- Understand and evaluate the cost and time of each app modernization
Re-Architecture Front-End
- Re-architecture the front end when it comes to modernizing legacy architecture with heavy tech debt
- The process also involves legacy code extraction and reengineering it for enhanced performance
Integrate CI/CD Pipeline And Bring DevOps Culture
- For a better collaboration between siloed operations and development teams, DevOps is essential, which also reduces issues regarding UX/UX modernization
- DevOps will foster enhanced collaboration among designing, development, and deployment teams to create an improved user experience
- It also allows continuous improvement based on early feedback and analysis
- CI/CD pipeline will help you revamp the front end without consuming much time and effort, as well as deployment of UI/UX builds
Choose The Tech Stack For UI/UX App Modernization
- Go for the right tech stack that you think will deliver the best business values
- Choose the right technologies that can help you build a sustainable front-end for your business app
- Do not go for the tech stack based on trends or economics. They may not end up thankless in delivering value to users
Solve User Concerns after UI/UX App Modernization
- Your app’s modernization journey from its legacy version may frustrate some users accustomed to using the legacy app for their daily tasks. So, address their concerns and fix them ASAP.
- Communicate the need for modernizing the app and its upsides to users before modernizing the app
- Document all the planned changes, and suggestions on how to use the app for the best customer experience
Improve UI/UX App Modernization Testing
- Employ different types of UI/UX testing methods for an efficient modernization process
- Choose scripted tests, decontextualized tests, natural usage tests, or hybrid tests based on necessity
- Also, consider regression testing while updating the app. You need to update the UI for all legacy versions as well
Also Read: Tools for UI/UX Designer
Winding Up
UI/UX modernization is an effective approach for reducing design and tech debt to improve user experience on your business apps.
For an organization to stay ahead of the curve in today’s ever-changing business world, addressing poor user experience is one of the most prioritized strategies. What would be the viability of your app if it doesn’t attract users based on poor UI/UX?
That’s why businesses are leaving one stone unturned to employ all the techniques and strategies to improve the UI/UX of their apps for enhanced user experience and improved conversion rates.
Get Binmile’s super-excellent UI/UX app modernization services!
Binmile is a leading software development company with profound expertise in legacy app modernization services. We have engineers specialized in the implementation of CI/CD pipelines for automated efficiency in rapid usability testing.
Moreover, we have expertise in digital product engineering to help you with efficient mobile app development and build an intelligent solution for your business needs.
