The best way to rethink things is to be in the shoes of your users. Use your app how they use your app. Try to take a fresh look at your application like you’ve never seen it before. Would you change the location of the menu/navigation? Would you change the actual menus/navigation? Would you add a shortcut search box where there wasn’t one before? Maybe you remove the advertising or move the place that the ads are located so that they are less intrusive…
The idea is that every so often you need to take a step back. Looking at your application from your users perspective may well change how your entire application works. I’m not saying this from a statistical analysis of the way people click and heatmaps and all that good stuff (though they do have their applications), I’m saying just a pure usability test from another perspective. Where do the new users look? Where do they click? What’s the first thing they want to go to? Are you putting them through information overload?
So take a step back, change shoes and take a fresh look at your app. No statistics, no heatmaps, no preconceived notions about the problem you are trying to solve (I know this is easier said than done). Just remember why you wrote your app in the first place. Try the passion on for size again and see if that doesn’t stir things up a bit.
