2 min read

Understanding Growth Driven Design

Mark Parent June 20, 2017 1:05:00 PM EDT

Website Design/Development

Websites are the flagship stores of modern ecommerce, and this means if your site isn't optimized and tailored to the demands of visitors, then your potential customers will go elsewhere. As such, it’s integral to take a growth-driven approach to modern website design that takes into account the changing tastes, desires, and interests of customers. Web design is no longer about putting together the flashiest site, but rather creating the most appealing site according to the users.

Tailor your website towards the demands of your potential customers.

Growth-Driven Design Means Using Data to Make Web Design Decisions

Traditionally in the world of ecommerce, a company would spend a certain amount of time designing and building a website based on their own tastes and the dictates of their brand, and once the site was launched, it would serve them, unchanged, for many years to come.

But those days are approaching an end, and the websites of today must take into account the changing needs and desires of users. A growth-driven website, therefore, uses data and analytics to inform website design, meaning users are the ones driving the design decisions.

Growth-Driven Practices Demand Constant Change

In contrast to the websites of yore, growth-driven websites are always in flux, are constantly changing, and are incessantly being improved and perfected, based on customer data. For example, whereas an image on your website may resonate with customers one month because it’s relevant to a current trend, the next month the fad has passed and it no longer serves as a point of interest with visitors to your site.

When the data demonstrates this, you change the image for something more appropriate that will engage visitors. You should never strive to complete this type of project because a growth-driven website is always a work in progress.

Growth-Driven Design allows for continual adjustments so that your site is

always fresh, engaging, and built for optimization.

Mining Data for Growth-Driven Design

There are lots of sources for customer data that you can reference when building, tweaking and rebuilding your website. In fact, any point of contact between you and your customers can be a source of valuable marketing data, but there are also other forums you can use to collect this valuable intelligence. Some of the best resources for growth data include:

Ongoing A/B test results
User surveys
Customer feedback and interviews
Website analytics
Sales and customer support team feedback

Doing Away with the Design Guessing Game

One of the best things about growth-driven design is that it takes the guesswork out of designing your website because you instead use actual visitor data to make educated decisions about your site. With the help of things like A/B testing and user interviews, you can know for sure which logo works better, where you should have images, what types of calls to action to use, what color schemes and fonts work best, and more. Then, you can create a data-based website that’s sure to appeal to the most customers.

In today’s fast-paced and attention-deficit world, it’s more important than ever to have a website that changes in response to user demands. Growth-driven design is all about building an ever-evolving website that reflects the ever-changing moods, behaviors, and interests of visitors. And while growth-driven design is a commitment that requires constant monitoring and improvement, in the end, you'll be rewarded with a data-based website design that’s always relevant and always engaging for users, and that will translate to higher conversions.

For more information about the differences between growth-driven design and traditional design, get your free copy of our Growth-Driven Design Playbook.