UI/UX Design is built upon the visual hierarchy of how data or information is laid out and presented to a user. In order to fix even the most common design issues, your job as a UI/UX designer must first be to understand why the current design is an issue in the first place.

The Problem

Say you have a project where, over many sprints and development cycles, new features and feature requests have been added to an existing piece of software without any sort of design considerations, due to time constraints and/or lack of proper workflow. This is a common issue when dealing specifically with legacy applications.

The application, and unfortunately the user, are now overwhelmed with new data or information that looks to be a mix of different one-off ideas a developer had while taking care of a small bug or feature request.

As a UI/UX designer, you must now take all of this new information and data that’s been applied to a once fully consistent application, and seamlessly match the look and feel to make it appear as if it was designed that way from the start.

But, how do you do that?

The Workflow

Now that you’ve been presented with the issue, you’ve probably already started scribbling down some quick wireframes that pop into your head. Maybe you’ve already jumped into your favorite rapid prototyping or wireframing tool and started clicking away at possible layouts to remedy the issue.

Whatever your first step, run with it. Always trust your initial gut reaction, and see what comes out on paper. You’re a designer, so however you go about designing just remember, this is kind of what you’re good at!

Let’s say you’ve gone through a couple of iterations and ideas, yet something just isn’t sticking. You’re designing new layouts but nothing feels cohesive. There’s just an unbalanced feeling with the space available and all of the elements that need to fit in it.

This is completely normal, and almost to be expected if you haven’t considered one thing by now…

The Solution

We have a problem, maybe a couple of half-baked ideas on how to fix the problem, but how do we truly go about solving it?

Before you can fix something, you normally need some instructions on how and when things are supposed to be put together. This is the missing secret ingredient.

In order to start truly solving the UI/UX problem, you need to figure out the most important pieces of information the user is in need of—given what that page or layout is presenting. We can then make a list of key data points, ranked from highest to lowest importance, which allows us to build a layout for the information to be dealt with appropriately.

Find your problem. Start your workflow. Rank key data points.

BOOM! Problem solved.