What is Growth Driven Design?
To better understand Growth Driven Design, GDD, let’s rewind and take a look at its predecessor: Traditional Web Design.
Traditional websites were only launched once the site was completely finished, and then the site would remain unchanged for long periods of time. The content and layout of the site itself were usually dictated by designers rather than user analytics or other useful information intended to shape user experience.
After a website was launched, its value to the business plateaued as needed improvements weren’t made or even realized. As a result, traditional web design developed a reputation for taking a long time to launch ineffective websites at an unreasonable cost.
GDD was developed as a way to address the pain points inherent in traditional design, and it does this by scrapping the traditional all-or-nothing approach to launching a website.
With GDD, websites are live far before they’re finished. Actually, a growth driven designed website is never truly finished at all. It’s under constant improvement, so its business value never plateaus.
How Does Growth Driven Design Work?
GDD operates in three phases:
- Strategize
- Launch
- Improve
Strategy Phase
The strategy phase is your opportunity to get an inside look at how consumers use your website. This is done by gathering data around how your clients use your website in order to analyze your customers, sometimes referred to as personas.
How are they finding your website? What time of day does the site see the most use? What types of devices are most commonly used?
When you know your customers’ behavior patterns, you can develop a strategy using GDD to make impactful changes to their user experience.
Once you know the changes you want to make to your website, you need to prioritize them. GDD relies on a continuous stream of improvements, so it’s okay – even encouraged – to have a lengthy list of “wants” and maybe even some “wishes.”
You also need to consider the essential functionality and features needed before you can launch your website.
You don’t want to fall into the trap that traditional web design often lays that prevents you from releasing changes until everything is perfect, so look at the full inventory of website design and decide what can wait and what needs to be launched first.
Launch Phase
If you’re used to the traditional approach that stalls the website launch until everything is finished, this may be a difficult adjustment to make.
GDD is purposefully iterative in nature, so the first launch of your website isn’t going to have all the bells and whistles. That’s okay! The first website launch should only have the necessities and maybe a couple “wants.”
It’s intended as a starting point for you to keep building onto, and the data being gathered from each change helps to inform you of what can be improved in future iterations so you always know you’re on the right track.
GDD allows you the flexibility to decide how often you release new iterations on the website, so new features and improvements can go live without the delays or major design overhauls inherent in traditional design.
Improvement Phase
You’ve studied your customers, prioritized development changes, and launched your website, but the work isn’t over.
Now it’s time to start developing the “wants” and “wishes” with the highest priority. The data gathered during the Strategy phase is a valuable guide you should use to inform your decisions.
Perhaps you discovered a high percentage of your website visitors were interested in your products page, but that it took them several clicks and navigation attempts to find it.
Making popular pages more accessible is a great way to improve user experience and a user-friendly website can keep visitors on your site longer.
Is Growth Driven Design Right for My Business?
GDD is not for every business. The article How Growth-Driven Design Impacts Your Sales Process (And Why You Shouldn’t Ignore It) states:
…if you run a dynamic company, breaking ground with your products or services, trying to edge out the competition as one of the new guys, or any other situation where online customer conversions via your website are vital for your sustainability – welcome, friends. Time to dive in.
If that sounds like you, the GDD may be exactly what you’re looking for.
Conclusion
Designing a website can be costly, both in time and money.
Too often, websites aren’t launched until they’re “finished.”
Monolithic tasks such as that have the tendency to miss important deadlines and cost you more than just the price of a web designer. Moreover, “finished” websites don’t offer the opportunity to learn, grow, and improve.
With our growth driven design services, you can launch your website on time without sacrificing your wishlist, and you’ll be able to see measurable improvements with every iteration of the website because all the design improvements are based on user analytics, not guesswork.
