Experience Rot affects full-site redesigns, too

Another of Jared Spool's wonderful rants: Experience Rot. It starts out with what you expect, a description of how rot starts with a product’s Version 2.0 and over time gets worse. Okay, whatever, right? 

But he hits on something meaningful:

It’s experience rot that opens a market up for disruption. The market leader, slowed down and overly complex, gives a chance for a new company to make inroads. By studying the small number of features that most users care about, and freed by not having a large codebase to deal with, they can implement a simplified version. This version is much easier for new users and a straightforward transition for the more experienced user base.

What Spool is writing about is most applicable to product design. Does that apply when you’re redesigning a whole website?

Hell, yes. What's a Website Redesign if not Version 2.0 (or 3.0, or 5.0…) of a product? So often as designers, we try to out-do the previous site – adding on design elements and movement and "surprise and delight" and bells and whistles and new content and and and and—

STOP.

Maybe we should approach a redesign as though we were pruning a tree to keep it healthy, strong and tall. What can we remove that isn't serving many people? What can we simplify or consolidate?

So here's a challenge. Next redesign project you're involved with, look at what already exists and ask yourself "What could I prune away that would make the rest stronger?"