Growth-driven design (GDD) is like Christmas for digital marketers. How so?
Just like all those letters sent to the North Pole around December, GDD involves making a wish list. The good news is, that unlike Christmas, your web design wishes can come true more than once a year with GDD.
With GDD, your website design will be constantly evolving based on website and marketing analytics, as well as strategic planning and mapping. Unlike traditional web design, GDD is more data-driven and results-oriented.
This means that in the initial strategy stage, you will be setting goals, identifying target personas, performing website audits, conducting user research, and seeking to understand user behaviors and motivations. Once these preliminary steps are taken, however, you will not build your website based solely on what is happening right now.
Rather, you will need to create a wish list of features and items you wish to incorporate as time goes on. This list can, of course, change as you go. However, mapping out your ideal website by means of a wish list gets your GDD project headed in the right direction.
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Just like those letters to Santa, your growth-driven design wish list can include anything you really want to see on your website. When you sit down to brainstorm with your team about what to include on your list, consider what your ideal website would be like if time and money weren't obstacles.
Essential brainstorming ideas can include:
Key impactful website sections and pages
Marketing assets, tools, and resources
Specific features, modules, and functionality
Design elements
Changes in experience based on devices, locale, or other factors
HubSpot's "Applying Growth-Driven Design to Ecommerce Websites" gives this advice:
"To create your wish list, sit down with your team and write down all of your "a-ha" creative ideas and everything that will set you apart from your competition ... Clearly not all of these ideas will be implemented, but putting together this wish list will help you develop your vision and a clear idea of what your "best website" would look like."
Once you have the list in hand, it is time to check it. Reasonably speaking, you will likely have a list that contains a fairly large number of items, most of which you will be unable to implement right away. This is where prioritizing comes in.
To check your list, review it with the entire team and identify the 20 percent of items that will produce 80 percent of the impact and value for your website's users. Once you have identified that 20 percent, filter your results by sorting them according to "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves."
In this step of the process, you are simply trying to determine the action items which will provide the most impact. This does not mean, however, that the other items of lesser impact are gone forever. It simply means that you are prioritizing the most important factors first in order to allow for a quick launch of your core website. Other features will be added in time, as the growth-driven process continues.
Once your wish list is complete and you have identified the elements that are essential, you will launch your new, leaner website. In another one of our articles, "Growth-Driven Design or Traditional Design? What's the Difference?" we note:
"Growth-driven design allows for fast and immediate implementation. In many cases, you will be able to make tweaks to your website and start monitoring the effects of these changes within a day."
What happens to your wish list after that? Keep it handy, because as time goes by, GDD allows you to add new features from your wish list to your site as needed. Additionally, you will be adding new items to your wish list, as customer behaviors and website analytics point you in new directions.
Re-visiting your wish list will help you keep your website priorities in order.
GDD is an efficient, scalable system of continual website improvement and optimization. When you are ready to learn more about it, download our Growth-Driven Design Playbook and get your wish list started.
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