Growth-Driven Design: What is it? Why Use It?
The traditional method of web design is definitely broken.
If you've ever been involved in a redesign of your website, you probably didn't enjoy the process. Between large up-front costs, four-plus month build times (often launching late), enormous time commitment for approvals and meetings — all to achieve lacklustre post-launch results — it's no wonder most companies only redesign every two to three years.
And that's a key reason so many companies have outdated websites. A complete redesign is super stressful, time-consuming, expensive, and doesn't tend to fulfill expectations.
Great User Experience is Critical to the Success of Your Business
Web designers are onto this.
Within the last five years or so, web designers developed new approach called “Growth-Driven Design”. It's a set of proven techniques that has evolved to be the most powerful tool for companies needing to update their online presence quickly — and more importantly: effectively.
At Flawless, our clients expect us to deliver leads very early on in our engagements. But converting readers to leads requires an excellent user experience, one that's in line with the latest web design trends. If we had to stop and execute a traditional web redesign every time we signed a client, we'd never make it past the start line.
But using the smart, efficient, inbound-friendly approach of Growth-Driven Design, we get client sites up to speed and generating leads swiftly. It's because it's simply a much more agile approach that produces quicker results with substantially less risk than traditional methods.
Growth Driven Design Methodology
So, how does that work? The theory is that you launch a website that has a better user experience than the current site as fast as possible.
But you're not done. Optimization is an ongoing process that sees changes made in response to performance. We continue to measure, adjust and augment using a systematic approach developed to produce a compelling website that performs better and better over time — rather than a a costly gamble that either works or doesn't.
Let's go deeper. The Growth-Driven Design methodology has three major stages:
#1 The Strategy
With research and interviews, we create the persona for the business and get a clear understanding of this audience and what their pain points are. The website needs to provide the tools to solve their problems along the buyer’s journey.
#2 The Launch Pad
Build a quick website that performs better than the existing one, but is not necessarily the final product. Rather the new site is the foundation on which to build an inbound journey and to continue to optimize upon.
#3 Continuous Improvement
After launch and the site is live, we continue to collect user data, and begin to identify the high-impact actions we need to take to grow the business. With constant analysis, testing, and learning about the site's visitors, we determine the direction of on-going website improvements.
The result? Reaching peak website performance quicker and more reliably.
Working Alongside Sales and Marketing
Growth-Driven Design is tightly integrated with Marketing and Sales. What we learn about visitors helps inform and improve Marketing and Sales strategies and tactics (and vice versa).
No matter your industry, your website is your number one salesperson. In an increasingly online world, it's almost always the first point of interaction a customer has with a business — so usability and conversion optimization make or break inbound marketing efforts.
Look for future blogs on the four best practices for Growth-Driven Design and Inbound Web Design. Until then, you can learn more about the techniques we've put to work for more than 70 B2B organizations right here.