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The Advent of Growth Driven Design
Background
Redesigning the website requires a lot of planning. It all starts with undertaking online research about the best designers in town. Next, you need to bring them down for a discussion and request for proposals. Even after lengthy negotiations and closing with one vendor, your woes are only about to begin. Add some topping of frustration over project scope, timeline overruns and budgetary constraints, and it is a total mess.
The answer to this is Growth Driven Design. It requires you to focus on the immediate impact and work on continuously improving the website.
Introduction to Growth Driven Design (GDD)
In the traditional approach of website design, it was broken down into silos of activities in which the team working on the project had to hand it off in the final stage with little to no influence on future events. However, in the GDD model, the website will be developed in small increments based on the importance of the features involved. In this way, the site will not be static but improve in increments over a while. This productive method of website design uses user information to undertake continual changes on the website.
GDD utilises a cocktail of lean and agile development processes involving a process of continual development by engaging the right prospects. So, in short, it is a new approach to web design that is user-focused and iterative. Moreover, it is always optimised to the latest technologies ensuring that your website is never obsolete. The process utilises information about the visitor patterns on the site. Furthermore, as the website is being continually updated, it stays optimised and is entirely immune to technological changes.
According to a survey done involving 3,500 companies that underwent a traditional website design, 54% said that the website redesign could require more than 6 months to complete.
It is estimated that only 49% of website redesign projects finish and launch on time.
— MarketVeepThe need for Growth Driven Design
Traditional web design is passé
Traditionally, websites were developed to give only one-way information. Sites spoke about whatever the founders or the marketing team wanted to tell the world. As more and more users logged into the internet to gather information and background about a company and its portfolio of offerings, it became a necessity to have two-way communication. Websites must be keeping up with the changing times.
Huge upfront costs
The traditional web designing model is also time-consuming. It required you to find out the latest technology and include them in your website all at one go. It would also mean loads of prospects missed as most parts of your site would be out of bounds due to work on the new site.
When you already know that your website could go obsolete within a few years, isn’t it risky to invest large sums of money on it? If your site isn't able to rake in the visitors and enticing them to a call-to-action (CTAs) of your choice, then all the resources are a waste.
Resource commitments are huge
Traditional models require loads of effort from your marketing team. It is not enough to include some chic features on your website. You will need to plan out the user journey across your website. It should have clear call-to-action across various stages of the user journey. Strategising about the workflows across the site requires the involvement of multiple resources across the organisation for some months altogether.
Benefits of Growth Driven Design
Faster launch
You can do away with the longer deployment cycles only to have a defunct website after a few years. With GDD, you can have a speedier deployment cycle with the site with critical functions up and running for your visitors within a month. Once you have the launchpad ready, you can work on future upgrades in increments.
Allows a goal-driven strategy
GDD enables the website to be customer-centric and create user-defined metrics to be calculated when needed. The defined KPIs help you to gauge the effectiveness of the changes in your website. You can now easily collect data about the user behaviour on your site, allowing you to invest resources in critical areas.
Your site moulds with your business
GDD allows you to deploy a website with critical features within a very short time. Being modular it will enable you to quickly make changes to the site and update any changes in your business. A modular approach also eases out on the budget front. Your competitors even lose out on the technological advancements as it is challenging to make changes to a full-featured website.
Continuous modification
GDD uses an agile concept of continuously modifying the website based on the must-haves in the wishlist. It makes good use of data-driven analytics and user feedback to build on the next set of features for the website. The marketing team can prioritise changes based on the collected data and have a more flexible website strategy.
The bottom point
Are you planning to upgrade your website anytime soon? You better hop onto the GDD bandwagon. It allows you to prioritise the website features by focusing on results. You can make ongoing changes in the website by incorporating behavioural analytics of the visitors. Moreover, you can also have a website with the critical features deployed in no time.
With a Growth Driven Design, the risk of your website being obsolete is minimised, and continual improvement also ensures the visitors complete their buyer journey across the website smoothly and transfer into pre-qualified leads more often.
This article is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge. Content is for informational or entertainment purposes only and does not substitute for personal counsel or professional advice in business, financial, legal, or technical matters.
© 2020 Sanjay Das