In today’s date and age, a website does not only need to look good aesthetically but function well. The website is an essential element of a successful brand and its e-business. The website is the foundation of all your online marketing efforts. As a rule of thumb, the business should re-design their website every 2-3 years to stay current, which establishes that a website is not something a company could effort to set and forget.   The traditional way of designing or re-designing a website is identifying the problem areas and employing the best practices to solve that problem. However, growth-driven design is an improved process of Website designing.

What is Growth-Driven Design/GDD?

Growth-driven design or GDD  focuses on creating a systematic and interactive website that can adapt to changing technology and the changing needs of our audience over the years. Based on user experience, their pain points, touchpoints, data, research, continuous learning, and regular testing, GDD helps businesses to make informed site improvements. The growth-driven design perfectly ties the concept of continuous process improvement based on UX, data, and agile methodology.

The Three Phases of Growth-Driven Design

The growth-driven design process is all about constantly measuring your site’s performance and making changes based on what you’ve learned to improve that performance. The following are the three phases of a growth-driven design:

 

1. Strategy

The first step is to create a strategy by auditing your current website, allowing you to see what works and what doesn’t. An audit will not only help guide your design, but it will also help provide you with benchmarks that you can compare your new design to moving forward. Your audit should include user testing, interviews, and surveys to understand better how visitors interact with your site. Once your audit is complete, set SMART goals to help define your desired results. Finally, revisit your buyer personas and buyer journeys to help guide your content strategy. There are three outcomes of a well-laid procedure:

Clear Objectives:  Clear objectives ensure faster movement to results, minimizing iterations.

Customer Focused: Focusing on the highs and lows of a customer’s journey based on data and behavior gives a clear vision of the to-be state of the website.

Ready to execute: Set out strategy gives a wish list of ideas, an actionable plan, and respective priorities against each item on the list.

2. Launchpad

Based on the strategy and wish list, a launchpad is not the finished product even though it’s fully functional for the end-user. Essentially, it enables tracking user behavior on the site, making it easier to figure out what is working well for the users and what needs improvement. At this stage, it’s easier to bring in prototypes and form website architectural design for SEO. Based on user behavior, gathering feedback on prototypes and marching towards a final design ensures a smooth and quick transition.

3. Continuous Improvement

With a live launchpad, it’s quick and easy for businesses to identify high-impact areas on the site. Using the data and analysis site needs to be continuously improved. This phase is made up of four stages:

3a. Plan

Planning here means segmenting the most compelling aspects of your website that broadly support the existing business goals.

3b. Develop

Developing is moving the outcome of the previous stage into execution.

3c. Learn

Learning means reviewing the past changes to determine what worked and didn’t so that the stakeholders have a better idea of how to improve the site for the following sprint cycle.

3d. Transfer

Transferring the lessons learned and sharing them with the organization’s different departments, from marketing and sales to service.

 

Many brands are choosing to implement a growth-driven design due to the ability to adapt to changing customer needs and a constantly changing online environment. Much depends on what the brand is trying to accomplish and the specific marketing needs. In some cases, a conventional web design may work just as well. However, I believe businesses should have increased conversions through GDD since the process begins with discovering more about customers and attempting to solve their pain points. The design directly addresses the personas. Further, having a launch pad rather than an entire-fledged site saves several months of missing out on enhanced conversions while customers wait and wait for a new place to launch.

Citations:

1. Summerfield, L. (2018). Growth-Driven Design Certification. HubSpot Academy. https://app.hubspot.com/academy/21261349/tracks/21/152/833
2. Growth-Driven Design. (2019). Growth-Driven Design. https://www.growthdrivendesign.com/v1/how-it-works/continuous-improvement