Five Design Exercises to Try When You’re Thinking about Redesigning Your Website

Whether a quick polish or an overhaul, these exercises are a sure bet for creative solutions

Posted on August 10, 2026 in Blog Posts

Designing a new website is about more than just aesthetics. It’s also a time to consider what is and isn’t currently working for your audience. Analytics can help you make some suggestions, but engaging your audience in the design process can help uncover aspects of your website that you’ve never considered.

Over the last two years, I have been engaging the community at Fairfield University to aid in redesigning the DiMenna-Nyselius Library website. These are a few exercises we conducted that got us talking about ways to make meaningful change.

Affinity Diagramming

During one of my early web committee meetings, I decided that the team of seven members would inventory our current home page.

As chair, I used our poster printer to create a 2’-by-3’ printout of our home page and provided sticky notes and pens so the committee could contribute thoughts about what they liked and didn’t like onto the webpage. They could also second things that another member had written down.

After about 10 minutes of adding post-its, we spent the rest of the hour-long meeting unpacking our observations while I made notes about things we wanted changed. Then, I had a student worker translate the post-its into an affinity diagram, where patterns and threads are grouped together based on themes.

This exercise was helpful for identifying small projects that we could implement quickly, and it gave us some goals for the new design overall. It is, however, something that works best in smaller groups since we had a lot to discuss about the page as a whole.

It’s also a practice that can be easily repeated over time to see how things change.

When our first redesign was presented after three to six months, the same committee looked at the page again and had a more positive outlook on the home page.

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Cart Sorting

Card sorting is an exercise where you have a predetermined list of items on index cards, and you invite users to sort them based on their instincts. The goal of this exercise is to determine how users inherently make sense of information that’s presented to them.

I have used this technique twice in a library setting.

The first time was to reinvent our Library of Things presentation. For this one, I prepared cards for an interdepartmental meeting with everything we had in that collection and then invited my colleagues to use them to work through how we would categorize items.

We decided that we were going to use Springshare’s new list interface, and by seeing our categories visually, we were able to determine what should be placed where, as well as where there was some crossover. After this initial meeting, we were able to do most of the cataloging asynchronously with a spreadsheet over Microsoft Teams.

The second time was to clean up our navigation. For this one, I used Qualtrics to create a survey with the four main categories we had in our navigation, and I placed all the listings underneath them as cards that could be sorted. I asked a couple of general demographics questions for later sorting and gave participants the opportunity for feedback on anything that stood out. The survey then went out to the entire staff with an invitation to forward it to other interested parties, such as our Faculty Library Committee and student workers. The result was very illuminating and confirmed some theories we had about our navigation, helping us make the case for a well-designed landing page.

The key in both instances was removing the content from the environment in which we typically interacted with it. I asked participants not to look at the current page or navigation bar and to operate on instinct. I also set a time expectation when setting up the survey, saying that it should only take them between 5 and 10 minutes, with some follow-up questions.

UX Café

Libraries serve a large number of people, and as an academic library, we have a large base of both power users and new users.

For this exercise, my goal was to understand the different ways people use our library’s website. One approach we tried was setting up a UX Café. Our Assessment Librarian and I ran three sessions in which we had students sit with us and asked them a few questions about their behavior on the library website.

Working with this format allowed us to reach a slightly wider audience and revealed a bit about how students were accessing and finding our resources. It surprised us to learn that quite a few were just using Google to search for the resource they knew we had and adding the university name to the search.

This exercise can be hit or miss with regard to whom you’ll get, and you are limited by how many staff you have at the table. (We found this works best if you have one person taking notes while the other person asks questions.) Training is also crucial for an exercise like this, so you know what’s valuable and should be recorded.

Crazy Eights

As a designer and overthinker, one of my favorite ways to think through interfaces is with the Crazy Eights exercise. This is done by folding a sheet of paper into eight sections and then giving yourself a minute to draw through a problem, coming up with eight potential solutions.

I used this approach with both our committee and our Student Library Advisory Committee. I asked them to design their ideal home page. Both sessions illuminated some unique desires that informed both our new design and gave us some things to work toward in the coming years. This exercise works especially well with a larger group, because you can collect the artifacts and refer back to them to see patterns in what people drew.

Evaluative Research

When developing something that people will actively use, you will find that static designs are different than a live website. Having data and content in a clickable and navigable format is crucial for determining what’s missing.

Once the original design for our home page was made, I sent out a live prototype that all our staff members could test, along with a survey. My goal for this deployment was not necessarily to solve a specific problem but to determine how much of my colleagues’ daily routines this design would disrupt.

Crucially, I only designed the home page. I left all the other links intact, made some navigation menu changes, and designed a survey with a few simple questions that would accompany the new design. The questions were framed to elicit a few yes/no responses and some short answers, so participants could explain their points of friction. This allowed me to preemptively fix any minor errors before a larger rollout and also gave me a couple of things to add to my road map for the coming months and years.

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