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Web Design | January 25th, 2021
Contributor Phil Robinson. Partner, Founder + CE
One of the most effective website design these days is using growth-driven design. Growth-driven design is an approach to website design and maintenance that succeeds in minimizing the risks of traditional web design. This systematic approach shortens the time to launch by employing real data, and continuous learning and improvement.
In this article, we’ll explain how growth-driven design works, the various stages of the process, and what’s it like to work with us to build a website emphasing growth-driven design.
The Growth-Driven Design methodology has three major stages: the strategy, the launch pad, and continuous improvement.
The goal of the strategy phase is to develop an empathetic understanding of your audience. This helps us understand how the website can solve problems along their journey. Try to imagine the world from your audience’s perspective.
The strategy needs to take these questions and more into account in order to be effective. For us, this involves several steps to make sure that your website can be a success.
There are several steps we’ll need to take to complete the strategy phase.
With a strong wish list of high-impact ideas, we’ll begin the second phase of the Growth-Driven Design methodology, which is the launchpad website.
The goal is to quickly build a website that looks and performs better than what you have today. Keep in mind that this version isn’t a final product. Rather, your launchpad is the foundation to build upon and optimize. The main driver for launching quickly and without sacrificing quality is to collect data from real users interacting with the site. Then, you’re equipped to make better, data-driven decisions on how to improve the website. Launching quickly also creates a quicker time-to-value versus the six or more months of a traditional web design project.
There are a few key areas you can focus on to accelerate the launch of a remarkable and effective website.
Once the strategy has been created and your launchpad website is live, the next step is the Continuous Improvement stage of the Growth-Driven Design methodology.
The goal of the Continuous Improvement stage is to start identifying the high-impact actions you can take to grow your business based on real user data.
Once you’ve launched the website, it may be difficult to stay focused on improving the highest impact items at any given time. So we’ll follow a simple yet powerful agile process: plan, build, learn, and transfer. Let’s look at each step.
In the planning step of the cycle, we’ll define the most impactful items to build or optimize at that moment in time to drive toward your goals. This starts by determining an area of focus that your team can rally their improvement efforts around. Focus is key.
The challenge is, there are many areas you could work on: from messaging to layouts to building new pages to optimizing existing ones. The wide range of options can make it overwhelming and difficult to determine where to best focus your time.
To figure out where best to focus your time, it’s helpful to have a website performance roadmap. The performance roadmap is a framework for you and your team to ensure you’re spending time and energy on improving the most impactful areas.
The roadmap helps you set clear expectations on exactly what you should and should not be working on and why. And because there are specific metrics to measure for each focus area, you can easily measure and report on your progress building a peak-performing website.
After planning out the website, the next step is to build it. We’ll create a website performance roadmap to track how your website is doing and what the next steps are.
There are three major themes: “establish,” “optimize,” and “expand.”
The establish theme revolves around the core foundational activities you can do when you’ve built something new. Within this theme, there are three focus areas.
The three focus areas under optimise include
The three focus areas within the expand theme include;
The website performance roadmap is ordered to match the lifecycle of a particular website. After your launchpad is live, it’s time to focus on the Establishing and Optimizing steps. Over time we’ll progress to focusing on the expand step.
Every website is different! It’s key that you let the performance metrics and experience guide the flow of your focus.
Each quarter, you should reassess how to divide your continuous improvement efforts between each focus area based on performance metrics. Once your quarterly focus area is set, it’s important not to shift. Shifting focus can create a lot of motion with little actual improvement.
Once you’ve determined your focus area, it’s time to complete user experience research, or UX research, to understand what challenges or friction points your website users are running into that’s preventing their progress.
Once there’s a good understanding of the challenges, your team will brainstorm all sorts of new action items to build. These items will drive user value while improving the performance metric in the current focus area. All ideas should relate to your team’s current focus area.
With a list of brilliant ideas, it’s now time to prioritize the list to identify the highest impact action items we can implement to boost performance in the focus area.
Based on your workload capacity, we’ll go down the list and select the high-impact action items until you run out of capacity. Anything you don’t get to will be reconsidered in the planning step of the next cycle.
With those high-impact action items in hand for the current sprint, together we’ll write out action item cards with four key elements. One, an outline of the specific customer scenario in the form of a “job statement.” Two, a hypothesis statement about your proposed change and the impact it will have. Three, any research or data that will backup your hypothesis. And four, an experimental design for how you plan on testing the hypothesis.
Now that you have a focus and prioritized action items to implement, you can move to the second step in the continuous improvement cycle: Build. The goal of the build step is to host a working sprint with a cross-functional team to complete all the high-impact action items.
Just like a sports team, your team will swarm on the action items to collaboratively tackle them in an aggressive fashion. With these action items as their focus, they’ll sync schedules, meetings, and work times.
In addition to building the action items, the team also needs to set up the experiments as outlined in the experimental design in order to properly measure the impact the action item has and validate or invalidate the original hypothesis.
We’ll launch what we’ve built and let your audience interact with our experiments. After a period of time–which will be different for every experiment-we’ll then move on to the Learn step of the cycle.
In the Learning step, we can take a step back to review the experiments you’re running to extract learnings about your audience. Was your original hypothesis correct or did you prove it wrong? If it was proven wrong, this is okay and fairly common, especially when first starting out and trying bold ideas.
It’s critical to assess the outcomes to learn more about your audience. What did their actions and behaviors tell you about them? How could you incorporate these learnings into future action items?
This is such a critical step because the more you repeat the cycle, the more you learn about your audience. The more we learn about your audience, the more likely we’ll have success in providing value and hitting your goal metrics.
Learning is a continuous process in the growth-driven philosophy. There’s always more to learn and apply to make your website do even better!
The final step of the continuous improvement cycle is the transfer step. The goal of the transfer step is to share your learnings and exchange ideas throughout the entire company to improve the entire business, not just one of the parts.
Between internal communications and meetings, this is where we’ll share your user learnings from the experiments you performed the previous step. Between us, we make recommendations based on the learnings of how we could improve. It’s important to be always asking questions of everyone involved, to pull insights and fill gaps in your user research.
You can also use this time for a consistent user experience during all interactions with your company.
This a cycle because we’ll continually repeat the steps, building momentum each time you repeat them. Generally, the cycle is repeated every two weeks. New action items will be built to impact the current focus for the quarter. Eventually, you learn and improve enough on that focus area and meet the metric goal that was set. Then you’ll move to a new theme or focus on the website performance roadmap to start the cycle again.
The Growth-Driven Design methodology starts with planning and research in the strategy phase. After that comes the creation of a solid wish list. Then, the wish list is built into the launchpad website. In this phase, you’re building a website that looks and performs better than what you have today but is a starting point for your website success. Finally, you’ll start the continuous improvement phase with month-over-month improvement.
This process is a great alternative to the existing method of a launch, which is more often than not the “set-it and- forget-it” process in traditional web design. With an industry that’s evolving as quick as website design, it’s important to be on top of–or ahead of–the trends.
A growth-driven website will be continuously improving to help all aspects of the business grow and see results each month.
Of course, marketing and sales are layers that live on top of Growth-Driven Design. Think of Growth-Driven Design like a sports car. It’s cool, but you still need gas (marketing and sales) for that car to drive. To develop a peak-performing growth business, you need all three working together, as they’re all interconnected and working off each other.
All of the challenges associated with the broken traditional web design process can be solved with Growth-Driven Design. This is the future of web design and the playbook for building a peak-performing website
Hopefully, you’re feeling inspired to grow as a business, to grow out of the broken, traditional web design process and starting to understand the value of building a peak performing website using Growth-Driven Design.
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