Website design is one of the single most important assets a company can cultivate. It is your brand, your sales and customer service platform, and the central point of your online presence in an exceedingly online marketplace. Your website is not just where you host content and help customers find what they’re looking for; it is essentially the face of the company. And every two years, you need a redesign to update the widgets, to hone your style to the latest audience developments, and to make sure your services stay at the cutting-edge of your industry.
Of course, we all know that a website redesign is a huge ordeal. You must assess every part of the website from the layout and navigation to the features and widgets. If anything is missed, it may have to wait another two to three years before it is addressed. Drastic changes can surprise and disconcert your client base, even if those changes were necessary to keep up with the times.
All of this comes together to bring us the latest in website development strategy: Growth-Driven Design. GDD is a perfect example of how the business culture is constantly combining all the best innovations of the last several years to create truly optimised cutting-edge solutions.
What is Growth-Driven Design?
- Rapid-Cycle Website Updates
- Data-Driven Improvements
- Performance Optimisation
- Immediate Access to Cutting-Edge Trends
Growth-driven design is a whole new approach to web development, one that is no longer based on the two-year redesign model. Web development has become so much more flexible since the initial website design model was developed all the way back in the 90s. GDD is based on a continuous development strategy and constantly pushing small optimizing updates to your website. Rather than waiting two years with a static website design then spending several months designing a new website, your growth-driven team is constantly analyzing the data and user-flow and developing ways to tweak it.
Rapid Website Updates, Rapid Results
The growth-driven design approach allows you to improve customer experience and streamline functionality month-over-month instead of waiting years to perform repairs, updates, and improvements. Rather than needing to get everything done at once, your team can improve one or two things at a time. Rather than dropping your customers into an all-new website every few years, they will experience a progressively more satisfying web experience without ever risking the shock of serious change. If a new widget comes out, you can integrate it.
Improve Based on Data, Inspiration, and Opportunity
The key to GDD is the ability to improve whenever the website needs improvement or could benefit from a change. This incorporates performance data, the opportunity of new technology, and inspiration from your team. If your team thinks of a new innovative strategy, you can implement it. Without a two-year wait or a one-chance launch. You will be able to wireframe, explore, and enact website updates without the need to schedule a whole new website design.
If the data says that your website isn’t converting effectively or there are buyer-path bottlenecks, you can fix these problems almost immediately. If a new widget or web feature becomes available, your website can explore incorporation without a complete overhaul design cycle.
Build a New Website or Just Start Updating
In an ideal implementation of growth-driven design, the company starts by rebuilding its website for optimal modular updates. But you don’t have to begin that way. The great thing about GDD is that it’s an approach, not necessarily a set-in-stone technique. You can try out GDD at first by exploring rapid-cycle updates to your current site. Then do one finally ‘big push’ website update to bring all your current assets into a high-speed modular framework. This is known as a launch-pad site, which we’ll dig deeper into later, and makes GDD update pushes much easier and more fool-proof to implement.
How It Works
Collect Data and Determine Improvement Paths
The birth of growth-driven design comes from the business culture’s growing investment in analytics and improvement. You are constantly collecting data on how the website is performing and how customers move through your site’s user experience. This information can be used for so much more than optimizing the content added to the site. A GDD team uses your site analytics, along with customer feedback and internal innovation, to plan incremental updates.
Plan a Rapid-Cycle Update to Site Improvement
Starting with the existing site design, a growth-driven design team will choose one or two things that could be improved. They will then develop a plan, wireframe it, and test the update in a test environment of the website. In the test environment, the update is examined to ensure it will not clash with any current features or pages and that it will perform in the way it was designed to perform. This includes mobile-responsive testing, speed performance, and user experience optimisation.
Implement the Update and Review Results
If the tests are satisfactory, the update is pushed to your live website and will change how your website looks, functions, or performs. These updates are sometimes noticeable to your userbase, but often they are subtle improvements that make the site more enjoyable, better-performing, or more responsive to user needs rather than an overt change.
When a push is complete, the process starts over with analysis of how the updates deliver results, and how the new data can inspire the next wave of updates. From there, your team will begin wireframing the changes to make sure everything integrates smoothly with the next growth-driven update.
What are the Three Stages of Growth-Driven Design?
Growth-driven design has a unique three-stage process that is an innovation on the old website redesign strategy. It is no longer necessary to rebuild each website update from the ground up. Not when most modern web designs are already modular and innovative in nature. The three stages of GDD are Strategy, Launch Pad, and Continuous Improvement. Let’s dive in.
Strategy
The strategy stage of GDD is where your team uses analytics, feedback, and an understanding of the customers to develop potential improvements to the site. At this stage, strategy is put before tactics, effectively creating a wishlist of ideas that come together into the ideal site plan for your brand.
The strategy phase identifies your ideal customer experience which addresses pain points and provides superb service every step of the way. The strategy phase ensures that when you build your initial GDD website, you are starting with a strong foundation of strategy based on what your customers really need and want.
Launch Pad
The launch pad stage is where tactics come into play. Building a launchpad website is faster and more innovation-friendly than a traditional website design. Because you have already gone through the strategy phase, the launch pad is an accelerated technical implementation of everything your website needs.
The launch pad website is rapidly prototyped and designed in sprints, focusing on the 3-5 pages that will have the greatest impact. During this time, your team can also put a new face on the bulk-pages of your site by migrating the old content to the new design framework. With the strategy phase backing up your design, the launchpad site can be launched quickly and at high-quality, ensuring that your new design is ready for the next phase: continuous development.
Continuous Design
The continuous development page is the hallmark of growth-driven design. Now that you have laid the groundwork with the first two stages, your website is ready to be improved in constant incremental updates based on data and feedback. Continuous design has it’s own four stages in which data is transformed into ideas, ideas become strategy, strategy becomes implementation, and implementation produced data to inspire the next set of ideas.
- Plan
- Ideas are prioritized and planned for the next improving update.
- Build
- The prioritized ideas are built into a framework that can be implemented.
- Learn
- The implementation is pushed to the website and data is collected on user response.
- Transfer
- The data collected inspires new ideas and priorities.
Why Go GDD?
So why should your brand invest in the growth-driven design model of website development? The answer to this question lies in your own pain-points. If you’ve ever seen a competitor or even non-related website that has something your website needs, GDD could add that in the next innovation cycle without a two-year wait or a three-month redesign. When your site analytics determine a problem with the userflow, GDD is built to fix these little hiccups in website design performance immediately instead of letting them fester while you build a whole new site design.
And if you’ve ever had an incredible idea for improving the website but didn’t want to wait for the next big redesign, that was exactly what growth-driven design was invented for.
Your website and customers deserve the best that technology and innovation can create. Growth-driven design puts that innovation at your fingertips. Your website becomes flexibly data-responsive and constantly improving. No wait, no delay, and no risk of spending three months on a site design with broken elements. Contact us today to find out more about introducing the benefits of growth-driven design to your company website.
