Practicing What We Preach: Utilizing UX Research to Build a Better Viget.com

The Temptation to See Yourself as an Expert

At Viget, we are expert designers, engineers, and strategists. We pride ourselves on designing and building sites, applications, and products that don’t just look great but achieve measurable outcomes for our clients. It’s what we do day in and day out. So when it came to our own website redesign, it could have been very tempting to rely solely on that expertise. To choose the seemingly faster route and skip the valuable steps of conducting user research and testing on our own work. 

We know users! We know our clients! We know UX and design best practices! Research will add to our timeline, and we want to get this beautiful, new site live!

But we also know what we tell our clients: it is far better to learn early what works and what doesn't than to rely on assumptions. And it is always a valuable exercise to test with actual users. The alternative? To forge ahead, build the wrong thing, and find out after the fact that you were very, very wrong. (Think Snapchat’s 2018 redesign that prioritized advertiser needs over those of the user, resulting in massive public backlash and a drop of over a billion dollars in share price.) 

What "Just Enough Research" Actually Looks Like

Conducting research and user testing can feel like slowing down. But the term "just enough research," popularized by Erika Hall's book of the same name, is a useful reframe. The goal isn't exhaustive research; it's scoped, efficient research that's just enough to ensure you're building around real user needs rather than internal assumptions. Ultimately, it can save a project time, money, and effort by avoiding the need to ship something that misses the mark.

For our own website redesign, we conducted scoped, mixed-methods research. We used web analytics and session recordings to understand how people were using our current site. We combed through industry reports and a competitive analysis to sharpen how we communicate our value proposition. We facilitated interviews with current and former clients to understand how they find and evaluate a partner agency. We even had those same clients test an early build of the new site.

Crucially, we ran this research alongside design and development rather than before it. Each time we wrapped a phase, we fed findings directly back to the team, enabling them to refine their designs and ensuring what was being built met real needs. That’s the difference between research as a tightly calibrated feedback loop versus research as a checkbox.

What User Testing Tells You That You Can't Tell Yourself

We really shouldn’t be surprised at this point, but what we learned from talking with our clients and watching actual humans interact with the new designs was pretty incredible. Things can feel so obvious and straightforward until you put them in front of someone who has a different perspective from your internal team, or watch someone try to understand a design you’ve been looking at for weeks. 

We learned that our clients generally visited our website at a very different point in the process than we had assumed, allowing us to calibrate our content to a different part of the user journey than we had initially anticipated. Through testing, we were able to understand exactly how a potential client engages with our case studies, helping us adjust our content strategy to better answer questions they might have about how we work and better showcase the power and impact of our past projects. We also learned that leaning too far into our “let’s have fun and really show what great designers we are” lane can be a turn-off to some clients, and learned to better balance some of the interactive parts of the new site with plain language content that would help orient and guide a user to what they want to see and learn.

Turns out, we’re still learning, even after 26 years building apps and websites.  

The Payoff: Launching With Confidence, Not Just Courage

There's a specific kind of anxiety that comes with launching something for which you haven't conducted user research or testing. It’s a fingers-crossed, hold-your-breath moment where you hope that all of your instincts and assumptions will carry you. 

Talking to real clients, watching real people navigate our new site, and feeding what we learned back into the design before anything was launched means we’ve already course-corrected. So when it comes to the day, we’ll launch knowing what works. That kind of confidence is available to any team willing to weave in UX research from the beginning of their project. Research isn’t a delay; it means you build better and you ship without holding your breath. Now just hold yours for our new site. It’s going to be great. We’ve done the research to back it up.