Do you want faster results? How about a website that will stand the test of time that your visitors will love? Avoid the typical headache and make your next redesign awesome with a growth driven design strategy to help your process.
Compare these 2 scenarios:
1. George went with a traditional redesign 6 months ago. Right now he’s sitting down with his staff and Trad Design who helped him redo his website. George is very anxious because this website represents a $50,000 investment, but he knows that good results aren’t guaranteed immediately. The untested redesigned website is going to launch tomorrow. The talk in the room is very positive, but George knows that this is all speculation and he has to wait for the results.
2. Tate started his website redesign at the same time as George, but used a Growth-Driven Design strategy. He’s currently sitting down with Avocado Design and his staff. Tate thinks about how he’s seen this project grow since they got the first “launchpad” version of the website up 5 months ago. As the meeting goes on, they review and discuss data they’ve collected over the past few months, which shows a 15% increase in site visitors. They eagerly plan their next move to get even better results in their continuous data collection.
Who would you rather be from these examples? Most likely Tate. But…
Why is Growth-Driven Design more practical than traditional web design?
Using Growth-Driven Design is like paving walkways on desire paths instead of on guesses. A "desire path" is a walkway created by human traffic. For example, in Finland planners are known to visit their parks immediately after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are not visible. People naturally choose the most desired path and the planners use this data to route the paths.
Photo by Jakub Kris on Unsplash
Imagine that the park planner decided to pave a different direction that was longer and less traveled by the hikers. Instead, the park planner paved where they hoped an intended path would work, without taking into account any of the known data about the hikers. Do you think that people stayed on the path and off of the grass?
When you redesign with the Growth-Driven Design methodology you get to be like the planner who paves along the desire path. You set up a launchpad website quickly, and then you're able to start collecting data from your visitors. This quick feedback helps you build a website your customers want to use, and keeps them from taking a different path.
How does it work?
Growth driven design can be broken down into 3 overall steps: Strategy, Launch Pad, and Continuous Improvement.
Strategy
“He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
A website redesign is a lot of work, no matter which way you choose. If you don’t have a solid plan then you could run a project with a lot of wasted money, effort, and time. Three things no business can afford to waste.
In the strategy phase you figure out what content is most important to your website using the 80/20 rule. This means you focus on the 20% that is essential to success of your website so you can launch a condensed version of your website very quickly.
You’ll think about pages that did the best on your old website, so that you don’t discard past success. And you’ll analyze your goals for this redesign. When you have a solid strategy, you’ll eliminate the need for another redesign in 6 months.
>> Learn more about a Website Redesign Strategy on our "How it Works" section
Launch Pad
The "launch pad" website is what you create with the 20% of most important content from your strategy. This is the foundation of the Growth-Driven Design philosophy. GDD is based on data, and without the launchpad site you have no medium with which to collect that data. With the data you collect in this phase you’re able to make continuous improvement and build along your customer’s desire path.
In a traditional redesign if you get a 30% increase in traffic, you won’t benefit until the site is live 6 months later. But with GDD, your site is launched much quicker so you can take advantage of that increased traffic for much longer.
>> Learn more about a Launch Pad on our "How it Works" section
Continuous Improvement
In a typical website redesign you’re left to guess about what will work and what won’t. But with GDD data guides the way.
With data collected from user feedback, and watching how people interact with your content you’re able to make choices that you know your visitors will love. It’s similar to running a crowdfunding campaign.
You collect payment for a product that may not even exist yet, which tells you that people want it. You then build the product with the full confidence that you will be successful. Why? Because you’ve already received the validation.
>> Learn more about a Continuous Improvement on our "How it Works" section
What now?
We’ve learned why it’s smart to build your website from feedback and collected data vs playing a guessing game. The three core steps to a successful GDD project are strategy, the launchpad website and continuous improvement.
Now that you know where to start, what are you waiting for? Don’t run another redesign that takes forever, leaves you stressed and will have to redone again and again. Instead start with something that can grow with your business.
This is a brief overview of the benefits Growth-Driven Design has to offer. If you’d like to take a more in depth look at the GDD process and the strategy behind it, enroll in the Growth-Driven Design Class today.
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