What UX improvements should come before UI improvements?
“We want to make our UI look better.” “We want to switch to the latest design.” Startups often come to us with requests like these.
In real projects, though, refreshing the UI alone often fails to deliver results.
What truly deserves priority is the UX improvement that comes before it.
Why UX before UI?
UI is about polishing the look and the interactive parts of a service, whereas UX refers to the entire experience users get.
For example, no amount of UI polish will solve problems like these.
- Users can’t find the feature they want
- The first-time flow is complicated and hard to understand
- Entering information takes so much effort that people drop off partway through
Unless the underlying experience is redesigned, users will keep dropping off.
Case ①: A reservation app
For a restaurant reservation app, the initial request was “we want a new look.”
Our research showed that the biggest problem was “too many steps to complete a reservation.”
So we cut the flow from 5 steps to 3 and added a feature that “automatically shows frequently used restaurants.”
As a result, the reservation completion rate improved by about 1.6 times.
It was only at this stage that we refreshed the UI, and improvements advanced on both the visual and the experiential fronts.
Case ②: SaaS onboarding
One B2B SaaS product had a well-polished UI, but low retention among new users was its challenge.
Research revealed that users were dropping off because they didn’t know where to start the first time they used it.
As a solution, we presented a quick tour and “the first goal to achieve” at first login.
As a result, retention after one week improved from 20% to 45%.
This is a case where results came simply from refining the onboarding experience design, without touching the UI.
Case ③: Product search on an e-commerce site
One e-commerce site hoped a design refresh would boost sales.
But what emerged from user research was a problem: “products are hard to find.”
So we improved the search experience by keeping the search bar always visible, expanding the main filters by default, and showing recently viewed products.
As a result, the average time to purchase dropped by 30%, and the purchase rate improved as well.
Polishing the UI afterward added the effect of strengthening trust in the brand.
Summary
- UI improvement matters, but on its own it can’t solve the root problems
- UX improvements (onboarding, task flows, search experience, and so on) should come first
- Getting the UX right before polishing the UI turns design into an investment that leads to results
For a startup, deciding where to put limited resources is an important call.
One answer lies in the order of work: first clear the “experience bottlenecks,” then finish the UI.
How Super XX Studio Can Help
At Super XX Studio, we carry out “design improvements that start from the user experience,” focusing on SaaS and web apps.
Rather than a mere UI refresh, we help raise a product’s value through user research, experience design, and UX improvement.
If you’re currently
- Wondering whether UI improvements alone will make a difference
- Wanting to know how to prioritize user research and UX improvement
- Considering a design investment that ties directly to product growth
or facing similar challenges, please get in touch with us.
Wondering what to prepare before getting in touch? See “5 Things to Sort Out Before Talking to a Design Studio.”