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Growth-Driven Design (GGD) is more than just another marketing trend; it is a powerful website redesign strategy that combines an agile approach with different disciplines like branding, functionality development, content management, conversion optimization, and user experience data.
Nowadays, your website is your number one marketing asset and the cornerstone of all your marketing tasks and activities. Consumers shop more and more online, which means they will most likely find your products or services through a search engine, such as Google. If your website isn’t optimized for search engines, e-commerce, and problem-solving oriented, you can potentially miss out on a lot of revenue.
However, we have the perfect solution for you: growth-driven design. Whether you’re looking to develop a brand new website or save money and efforts when relaunching your current one, GDD is the solution. If you’re interested in figuring out how your website can benefit from using GDD, continue reading!
The growth-driven design process focuses on continuous improvement using an agile methodology to shorten the time, expenses, and headaches of the web design process. While we appreciate traditional web design and development, it demands a lot of time, a big budget, and team members work individually. As a result, your site’s ranking and the data are unreliable due to constant changing, miscommunication, and unfinished web pages.
In short, the traditional designing method isn’t agile nor competent enough to quickly (re-)design, develop and optimize your pages. Growth-driven design simplifies the process by dividing it into short periods. Furthermore, it lets content creators, designers, and researchers work interactively with one another, which improves the overall management of the website.
The infographic below illustrates the difference between traditional and growth-driven design further.
Traditional Web Design | Growth-Driven Design |
Complex designing processesMassive costs in design with limited effectiveness | Focusing on a Simple UX DesignAgile methods that save time and costs |
Marketing strategies get frozenNo tracks or metrics available while building the site | Marketing strategies are a continuous processContent, site structure, and metrics are under constant evaluation and subject to adjustments. |
Significant updates and tweaks must be postponedBudgets to build traditional websites are usually susceptible to increase as processes hardly ever go as planned | You can redesign whenever you choose itAgile principles allow you to pick the best moment to tweak minor issues and conduct major redesigns at lower costs. |
Responsive design usually is a real pain in the neck.Traditional website designing is usually incompatible with mobile devices. Developers need to create a separate website for this. | Responsive design premises fit easily.The workflow allows you to test, fix, and refine every aspect of your design process, mobile compatibility included. |
The GGD cycle consists of five main aspects and three additional ones, which will be discussed in the following sections.
The first phase is the foundation or launchpad website; this is the preliminary version of your new/improved webpage. Think about it as a rough diamond to be tailor-made.
What matters most here is how functionality will be translated into your web design elements. During this stage, you create a wishlist and set the first steps in the route towards the final version of your website. Your GGD wish list consists of all the features you already have on your website plus those you want to include. It works as a rough draft to drive and point your efforts.
Whether you have a website to improve through growth-driven design or building it from scratch, what you need is to simplify the premises of traditional web design and develop your User Experience (UX), that’s it. Step two focuses on creating a structure.
Organize and set the divisions, pauses, and white spaces and provide a rough skeleton to add your page’s muscles.
Once you have created the structure, it is time to fill it with coherent images, optimized content, and similar elements. Afterward, evaluate the way they interlink and make the UX smoother with your team.
After the first two steps, it is time to focus on your marketing goals. Be sure that they make perfect sense as they determine where to focus your efforts on your website’s back-end and even front-end.
Additionally, your goals will help you a lot when establishing the best KPIs for your website, and properly configuring your analytics for further tweaks and adjustments. Once you finish this step, your website is ready to be launched.
The fourth step is keeping an eye on your website’s performance. The data you gather from your different analytic tools is a powerful indicator of your user’s behavior. You can use this information to improve the experience of your customers.
Furthermore, the collected data will help you to select the next elements on your webpage. Which pages to submit to A/B-testing, what changes need to be made and what aspects need to be removed. Do not be afraid of using heat maps, mouse movement tracking, surveys, and complementary tools to understand your visitors’ behavior better.
The fifth step is not just a step but one of the essentials of growth-driven design in general. Continuous improvement refers to taking an in-depth look at your back-end to determine what is working, what is not, what can be improved, and what should be discarded.
The improvement process never stops since new technologies, trends, and design tweaks to integrate and improve your site appear almost every month. Therefore, it is vital to update your schedule, create a new wishlist, think of extra adjustments (whether aesthetics or from a different nature), and restart the cycle every few weeks.
Besides showing smooth visuals and transmitting a great feeling, a good website needs to deliver value and tailor to the final users’ needs. At the same time, it must help you meet your marketing and business goals. How the website functions to fit both your requirements and those of your audience determines its success.
Even when the final website isn’t completed yet, you must launch the first website. What you need to focus on is keeping a balance between quality and customer satisfaction within a clear work plan.
Experience tells us to set and follow realistic objectives not exceeding 45 days long: all you’ve found on your initial research strategy will be obsolete in about 90 or 120 days, tops. Setting clear goals to meet your research objectives will help you agilely move and deliver a timely accomplished launchpad website.
It’s good to keep in mind that a launchpad website isn’t a low-quality website. Instead, a launch pad website is a robust and optimized foundation to develop an ever-improving site evolving at your brand’s pace.
Entertainment for your audience is most likely not on your first created wishlist. The aspect is often overlooked, but don’t worry about it; you can include it whenever you’re ready, thanks to growth-driven design’s agility.
However, a fundamental question arises at this point: do all websites need to entertain? Perhaps not in the strictest sense of the word. It helps to engage your audience by giving them entertaining information/videos or other content that connects to your product/services.
Keep in mind that entertainment is not equal to fun, leisure, and laughs; it also comprises education and spending time on interesting subjects.
Consider including the entire team when you’re working on the entertainment part of your website. Include gamification to make things interesting for your developers, designers, and copywriters; it will make it easier to let the “fun” speak through the entire website. After all, you can notice when a website is created with love and involvement.
There are plenty of tools out there that will help you during the growth-driven design process. However, before you go ahead and buy multiple platforms and tools, these are the ones that have brought us the best value.
Content Management Systems, such as Hootsuite and Hubspot, help you schedule blogs, emails, and social media for multiple channels. It is an easy way to keep the oversight and assure you’re not missing
Agile Project Management Tools like Slack, Monday, and Notion, help you keep track of everybody’s process, progress, and the final results. anything.
As you understand, growth-driven design is more than just another marketing trend. It is a powerful redesign strategy that compiles agile working with other disciplines to create an efficient, functional website as the starting point of your overall marketing strategy.
GDD is a more simplified version of traditional web design. It’s the natural evolution of conventional design towards efficiency and effectiveness for both back and front end development. However, keep in mind that change starts by exploring new things and points of view.
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