A smarter approach to web design, growth-driven design drives optimal results and consistent growth by making continuous improvements to your website in response to feedback from user behaviour and data.
It's based on the idea that websites should be focused on the user, designed in response to feedback and evidence, and tweaked in response to new insights and a rapidly changing digital world.
In this article, we'll look deeper into growth-driven design and how you can implement it in your own company. First, let's break down why it's a better method than the traditional approach to web design.
Why Growth-Driven Design is Better than Traditional Design
Traditional web design has some flaws. For example, it typically involves one project in which the site is designed, built, and launched… and then simply left. The team involved congratulate each other and move on to the next job.
This approach works fairly well for a while, but not long-term. The site remains the same while technology and marketing advance at breakneck speed all around it, and within a short amount of time, it’s outdated and inefficient.
What’s more, the traditional approach is not well-suited to testing. After the launch, there aren’t many opportunities to monitor the site’s performance and make improvements. As a result, decisions are often made based on individual opinions rather than actual data, and the final site falls short of its potential.
- In contrast, growth-driven design does the following:
- Uses user data to make ongoing changes to your site
- It’s all about continuous improvement in response to feedback
- Allows you to observe visitor behaviour and make changes accordingly
- Provides an alternative to traditional design, one that relies more on real data and less on the (often outdated) opinions of individual people
- Can be tightly integrated with your marketing and sales efforts
Growth-driven design is also good for business. According to the 2017 State of Growth-Driven Design Report, "agencies that used Growth-Driven Design reported seeing 16.9% more leads after 6 months [and] 11.2% more revenue."
Now that we've covered a few of the reasons why growth-driven design is worth investing in, let's take a look at how to implement it.
Growth-Driven Design: How to Do It
Implementing growth-driven design can typically be done in three main stages. Let’s take a more in-depth look at those and how they work.
Research and Strategy
In this stage, you'll analyse the metrics you currently have and start gathering the data needed to put together a solid strategy for your website.
A bit part of this stage is customer research. It’s time to get to know your customers inside and out. Here are some ways to do that:
- Talk to your customers. Send out surveys, interact with them on social media, and ask for their feedback in emails. Talk to your sales staff — they may have a closer understanding of your customers than anyone else.
- Create buyer personas. Even if you already have these, it can be helpful to create new ones as customer profiles often change over time.
- Map the buyer’s journey. Figure out the steps and actions your customers tend to take, from the top of the funnel to the moment they make a purchase, and beyond.
- Make use of user testing, analysing how people behave on your site and what they find easy and challenging. This can be a highly effective, evidence-based way to learn about your customers and what they want from a website.
Once you’ve gathered the above information, it’s time to put together a strategy. Think about your goals for the website and potential challenges. Next, it’s time to create a launchpad for the site.
Launchpad Website
The next stage is to create a launchpad for the site. This is where you build an initial version of your website using the data you collected in the first stage to inform your decisions.
It’s important to note that this website shouldn’t be viewed as the finished product: it’s a starting point. This is the core tenet of growth-driven design, that the work is never truly finished. The growth-driven ethos is all about constant improvement and tweaking.
Here are some stages in the launch process:
- Create page plans and flows for every main page, prioritising user needs and SEO
- Build out your page plans into prototypes or wireframes, ready to be designed
- Run design sprints to quickly flesh out those prototypes and gather feedback
- Add the finishing touches such as coding, metadata, and browser testing
Continuous Improvement
In growth-driven design, launching your site is just the beginning. The final part of the process involves carefully tracking, measuring, and updating your pages in response to feedback and the results of your analysis.
A good way to do this is to focus on the specific metrics you want to improve, one at a time. Build the initial features of the website according to the initial plans you made, and then track and monitor the relevant metrics to gauge how effectively your site is working.
For example, you might perform split tests to see how well your page performs with one feature versus another.
Finally, you should share findings with the wider team and implement any necessary changes to make sure your website is the best possible iteration of itself that it can be.
At Adonis, we can help you adopt a growth-driven approach to designing, building, and maintaining your website. We have a wealth of experience, a team of experts, and a suite of marketing tools and knowledge.
To find out more about how we can help, get in touch with us today.