Digiruu is an award-winning app UI/UX design agency in London, and an app redesign is one of the most common reasons people call us. Not a new product — an existing one that works, has real users, and is quietly losing them.
We take apps somebody else launched and rework them around what the data says people are actually doing. Over 30 verified Clutch reviews at 4.9, published fixed prices, and a free UX audit as the first step, before you spend anything.
A redesign is a deliberate rework of an existing product’s structure, its interface, or both, driven by what the current version is getting wrong. It is not a new colour palette. It begins with evidence — analytics, session recordings, store reviews, support tickets — and ends with an interface that matches how people behave rather than how the roadmap assumed they would.
We run this from our studio at 86-90 Paul Street in Shoreditch, London EC2A 4NE, and have been designing mobile products since 2016. A good share of that work is picking up apps other people shipped. If you are starting from nothing instead, our app design agency in London page covers that route.
Redesigning is the right call when the product has proven demand but the experience is capping it. There is a version of your app where the same users do more, and the gap between the two is design. It is the wrong call when nobody uses the app at all — that is a positioning problem wearing a design costume, and we will say so.
Most people who contact us feel something is off before they can name it. These are the patterns we see most often, and they arrive in groups.
Installs look healthy, day-one retention does not. The app asked for commitment — an account, permissions, a card — before showing anything worth committing to.
Not crashes — confusion. “Can’t find”, “too many taps”, “used to be easier”. Store reviews are the cheapest usability research there is, and most teams read them for sentiment.
Features were bolted on one release at a time, each in the style of that month. Three button treatments, two navigation patterns, spacing that changes per screen. Nobody decided this.
Your app is judged in the twenty seconds after it opens, against whatever the user had open before it. Dated is not broken, but it costs you trust when you have least of it.
What worked for twelve screens does not hold at eighty. Designers copy components instead of reusing them, and every new feature costs more to ship than the last one did.
Contrast that fails, touch targets under the minimum, no dynamic type support, controls a screen reader announces only as “button”. It excludes real users and increasingly stalls enterprise procurement.
One of these on its own is worth fixing in place. Three or more usually means the structure is the problem rather than the screens, and patching symptoms will keep costing you releases. A free UX audit tells you which situation you are in, and it is the sensible first step.
Evidence, then structure, then interface. Redesigns fail when a team redraws the screens it already has without asking whether those screens should exist.
We start with what you already hold: analytics funnels, drop-off points, session recordings, support tickets and store reviews. Then we put the current app in front of people who match your users and watch where they hesitate. The output is a ranked list of where the product loses people.
Information architecture and flows before pixels. Which tasks matter, how often, and in what order. Most of the improvement in a redesign comes from this stage — removing steps, changing defaults, reordering navigation — and almost none of it requires a new visual language.
Now the visual layer: typography, colour, iconography, motion and a component library built as a system rather than a set of pictures. Empty, error and loading states get designed too, because that is where most apps quietly fall apart. Accessibility is checked as we go.
The real risk is not that the new design is worse. It is that it is unfamiliar. Users who had learned your app open it to find a product they have to learn again, and a proportion will not bother. That is how a measurably better app loses engagement in the month after launch.
We avoid it by staging the change. Navigation first, released on its own and given time to settle. Then the core flows. Then the visual layer. Where the shift is significant we design the transition itself: a walkthrough of what moved and why, a way back to the old view, and analytics on both versions.
A big-bang relaunch is occasionally right — when the brand is changing at the same moment, or the old app is past staged repair. It should be a decision, not a default.
Three different problems get described with the same sentence: the app needs redoing. Working out which one you have will save you more money than anything else on this page.
The code is sound, the app is stable, performance is acceptable — but people cannot find things, the flows fight them, or the interface has aged out of its category. That is a design problem. New design over the existing build is the cheapest good outcome available, and the most common case we see.
The app crashes, cannot be updated without something else breaking, sits on a framework nobody maintains, or takes three weeks to ship a change that should take a day. Redesigning it is fitting a new kitchen in a house with subsidence. Design and code have to move together.
Sometimes the app is fine and the problem is elsewhere: acquisition, pricing, the value proposition, or a market that does not want the product. A redesign will not fix a product nobody wants. We have ended first calls by telling people to spend the money on their onboarding emails instead.
The honest version: a redesign improves how well an existing value proposition lands. It does not create one.
Which of the three you are in is settled during the Blueprint, before you commit to design or build — and often earlier than that, in the free UX audit. If the answer is neither, you will hear it then.
A redesign is judged by what changes after it ships.
Climate Week NYC is the world’s largest climate summit. The app it had before ours was a white-label events platform — an off-the-shelf conference product with the summit’s branding applied over the top — and it was barely used.
That is a common failure mode, and an expensive one. A generic events platform can list a programme; it cannot make one navigable. Climate Week NYC runs more than 500 events across ten programme themes and multiple venues, and at that scale a stock schedule view stops being useful. Attendees open the app, cannot find their way through it, and stop opening it.
So the redesign had a clear job. Make 500 events navigable: how the programme is filtered, what an event looks like at a glance, and how somebody assembles their own week out of that many options. It also had to carry digital events running worldwide alongside the physical ones in New York, without the two blurring into each other.
The sustainable business directory was new scope — restaurants, stores and services across New York City, which did not exist in the previous app at all. A directory is a different information problem from a schedule: it is browsed rather than planned against. It had to sit alongside the programme without either one getting in the way of the other.
That is a structure problem before it is a screen problem, so the work started with information architecture, and the interface came after that was settled. We redesigned the app for iOS and Android, and it met all its targets: more than 1,600 downloads in the first week, over 1,200 registrations, and more than 1,200 interactions across seven days — first-week numbers for a summit whose previous app had barely been opened.
Other work, some of it redesigns and some built from scratch:
Not a redesign — a new iOS and Android app for a fashion brand that already had a successful e-commerce website. Its marketing messages went from being read 30% of the time to 80%.
A beauty brand app that reached the top 100 of the entire App Store, ahead of Missguided, Co-Op and Ikea — a small independent label holding its own next to far larger budgets.
Sleep and meditation, where the interface has to get out of the way. Restraint matters more than expression when somebody opens your app at midnight.
Women’s health, where clarity and trust matter more than novelty. Sensitive data, careful defaults, and a tone that never talks down.
We have also worked on Amore Pizzeria, which has taken more than 50,000 orders and grown into a multi-million pound business; Thrive, which cut the time spent on casenote admin in half; and Moblox, where a customer can buy airtime in under a minute, faster than any major UK provider. Subconsciously won Best Social/Lifestyle App at the Best Mobile App Awards 2023. Not all of that is redesign work, and we would rather say which is which. The full portfolio is at Our Apps.
The same three packages as everything else we do. Published, fixed, and the same for a redesign as for a product built from scratch. If you want to see how they compare with what UK agencies typically charge, our guide to app design costs in the UK sets out the market bands.
Discovery, requirements and scope. On a redesign this is where we audit the existing app, interrogate your data and test the current experience with real users.
You leave with a specification, a prioritised list of changes, a costed plan — and an answer on whether you need a redesign, a rebuild, or neither.
Blueprint plus Design. The redesign itself: new information architecture, reworked flows, every screen and state, a clickable prototype and a design system your developers can build from.
Right for teams with engineering already in place.
Blueprint, Design and Build. The redesign and the engineering to ship it, including QA on real devices and submission to the App Store and Google Play.
Right when the code must change too.
We will not quote a timeline before we have seen the app. Fixed means fixed: scope is agreed at the end of the Blueprint and the price does not move unless you change what you are building.
Our published prices are £12,000 for the Blueprint, £30,000 for Blueprint plus Design, and from £75,000 for Blueprint, Design and Build. A design-only redesign of an existing app is the £30,000 tier. Across the wider market you will see anything from a few thousand pounds to several hundred thousand. A cheap redesign that has to be redone is the most expensive option there is. Our UK app design cost guide breaks those market ranges down band by band, including what a redesign on its own usually costs.
With the free UX audit. We look at the app you already have and tell you what is costing you users, before anybody signs anything. If it turns out you do not need a redesign, that is the cheapest way to find out.
It depends on how many screens and states the product has and how much of the structure changes. As a general guide, a Blueprint runs a few weeks and a design-only redesign of a mid-sized app takes a couple of months, with a staged rollout spreading the release over further weeks. We commit to a dated timeline at the end of the Blueprint.
It can, if you do it badly. The failure mode is familiarity: people who had learned your app are forced to relearn it overnight, and some stop. That is why we stage the rollout, with a walkthrough of what moved and a way back for a defined period.
Both, and we will tell you which you need. The Pro tier at £30,000 is design over your existing build. The Max tier from £75,000 covers design and development together, for when the code is the real constraint.
Yes, and it is common. We hand over a component library, specifications and a clickable prototype, then stay available through implementation, reviewing builds against the designs. Design thrown over the wall is how redesigns end up half-implemented.
Normal, and not a problem. We rebuild from the live app: screen inventory, states, edge cases, and the rules the product has been following whether or not anyone wrote them down. You finish with the design system you never had.
We agree the measures before we start, during the Blueprint, and they come from the evidence stage rather than a wish list. Typically that means task completion rates, drop-off at the points where the old app lost people, retention at day one, seven and thirty, and support tickets about confusion. We take a baseline from the current app first, so if the numbers do not move that is a finding too.
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. You will leave with an honest view of whether your app needs a redesign, a rebuild, or nothing at all — and roughly what each would cost.
If what you are planning is a new product rather than a rework, our app design agency in London page walks through the same three stages applied from scratch.
Not ready to talk? Start with the free UX audit. We look at the app you have and tell you what is losing you users.
Digiruu, 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE. Or see the apps we have made and get in touch.
