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Typically, redesigning your website is an employment database package expensive task that takes, if we're optimistic, about 6 months, during which time part of your team will have to focus all their efforts and attention solely on this task. But is there a much more agile methodology? Yes, it's called Growth Driven Design and this year 2019 is coming with a bang.
What is Growth Driven Design (GDD)?
It is a combination of marketing and design that aims to create a much more intuitive website that adapts to the needs of its users, improving their experience. It has three fundamental pillars: test, learn and adapt. The GDD methodology helps to minimize the risks associated with traditional design.
Growth Driven Design focuses on information
The foundation of a growth-oriented design is data . As it is in a constant process of testing and learning new things, it results in strategic performance and a positive impact on your website. Unlike traditional design, its planning is much shorter and can be executed in a short time, so its cost is also significantly lower.
With Growth Driven Design you collect the information that your own users provide you: how they behave on your website, where they click the most, which sections they prefer and which ones they don't find relevant. In short, you can build your website based on your users' preferences.
Get to know growth driven design
Why should I use it?
The human attention span has dropped to just 8 seconds. It is essential to win their hearts in this short space of time.
Around 40% of consumers will abandon your website if the loading time exceeds two seconds.
Smartphone usage for web searching has increased by 78% over a two-year period.
Mobile devices take up two of the three minutes of internet access.
What does all this mean? Your potential customers expect to find a solution to their problems in your products or services. This is where GDD offers you better opportunities to capture leads than traditional design.
Key to this methodology is the joint work of your sales and marketing teams with designers and programmers to constantly test what works for your users instead of simply assuming it.
Take advantage of the freedom offered by Growth Driven Design and optimize your website based on your customers' expectations and desires: constantly redesign your site as you discover, thanks to the behavior of users with your website, what gives you a better ROI and allows you to get more customers.
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Phases of Growth Driven Design
Phase 1: The strategy
To correctly execute this methodology, you must follow these steps:
Step 1: Identify objectives
When you start a website redesign process, you must be very clear about your objectives, since this will determine how functional the site will be. We have said it before: it is useless to have a visually beautiful page if it does not generate any type of conversion. So your objectives must be SMART , these are “intelligent objectives” that, according to their acronym in English, are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.
Step 2: User Experience (UX) Research
Your best starting point is your current website, so it's important to analyze its metrics and, above all, use the experience of your current users to know exactly what to improve while you start collecting new data.
You can use user interviews, surveys, collect feedback directly on the website or via chat, audit your current website, subject it to in-depth testing, and analyze the role of your website in the results of your conversion funnel.
Step 3: Key insights assumed
Many companies make the mistake of believing they know their users without any tangible information to support their perceptions. In this step you must contrast what you think they want with what they really want. How? With data. It is important to analyze the interaction they have had with your website, the data they are providing and their real motivations.
Step 4: Create your buyer persona
The previous step leads us directly to this one; if your company already works with an inbound methodology, you are most likely familiar with this term, and if not, don't worry, it's not very complicated. A buyer persona is a fictional representation created to represent the personality, desires, and aspirations of our ideal client and is essential for a redesign process because you must always be clear about who you are creating the platform for.
Stage 2: Launch Pad
Unlike traditional design, GDD allows for constant development and publication of advances, so it is recommended to implement changes on a launch platform with a “minimum viable product” in which we can begin testing the results.
Please note that this will not be the final version of your website, but it will be better than the current one. However, the purpose of this platform is to test whether our strategy was indeed the right one to achieve our objectives.
What do we do in this phase?
We plan each test page, flow and pillar page, paying special attention to user needs and our positioning objectives.
We create the content that will lead us to the prototype design. If we have the content beforehand, the design will be faster and more fluid.
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Stage 3: Continuous improvement
At this stage, all your actions will revolve around your users and this is where you will apply the constant redesign of your website. Your main objective will be to map how all the progressive changes you have implemented have affected the user.
It's important to gauge their reaction: what they think of the change, if they like it, if it's easy to understand or if they would change anything. Can you think of a way to do it? The answer is one: TEST. Create live groups, use heat maps, incorporate questions into your website ; this is the time to get closer to your users and put yourself in their shoes, remember that the success of your page will depend on them.
Stage 3 is also composed of sub-steps. These are:
Step 1: Planning
You'll need to analyze your website's performance month by month to determine the results you've achieved and how they compare to your goals. Evaluate what needs improvement? What's working? You may find that there are other goals you should include.
Step 2: Development
It's time to bring your entire team together (marketing, sales, commercial) to determine the tasks you need to carry out to improve your website based on feedback from your users. This is when you should generate marketing strategies that help you generate traffic to your new pages.
Step 3: Learning
We must begin to learn from our mistakes, evaluate what is not working and how to improve it. Learn from your users and your work teams according to the experience they have with your clients.
Step 4: Transfer
The final stage of your Growth Driven Design process is to share all the valuable business insights you’ve gathered in the redesign process with your sales and marketing teams so they can use that intelligence to increase conversions of leads into customers.
Step 5: Repeat the cycle
The steps in the Continuous Improvement stage of Growth Driven Design should be repeated month after month for at least a year, this way you can identify improvements for the site and implement them in the short term, in order to ensure that your website has enough impact to grow your business.