What is Growth Driven Design and how does it work?

How often do you implement improvements to your website? If the answer is less than three times per year or you are currently thinking of carrying out a comprehensive redesign of your website, then this blog post is for you.

The old, traditional method for web design is based on a long process of at least six months; during this time, your website is kept in the old format while a group of specialists develops every single detail of the site until it is completely finished and ready to be launched.

Your website is, on many occasions, the first impression that you offer, and you cannot wait for such a long process to carry out a redesign. That is why you have to use the growth-driven design method.

Growth Driven Design or GDD is a methodology that will help you optimize or redesign your website in a more agile way, reducing risks and getting better results from day one.

GDD is based on a strategic approach to constant optimization and continuous analysis of the behavior of web visitors. It consists of launching a first version of the web that will not be the final one, but will be optimized and improved based on these behaviors.

Let's look more deeply at the three stages of Growth Driven Design:

1. Strategy

This consists of developing a clear knowledge of the environment of your audience and how your page can solve their problems throughout the Buyer Journey. To do this you must collect information involving different teams within your company.

• Define your business objectives: How important is your website for the growth of your business? What do you want to get our of the page?
• Do a brainstorming session: Brainstorm ideas that help solve user problems, add value, and achieve business objectives. Then prioritize the most important ones.
• Audit your current website: Review your existing website and plan out the transition. Audit and analyze your content and positioning to know which pieces you can reuse and which ones you should remove from your new website.

• Consider Jobs Theory: Think about the jobs to be done based on the motivations of your audience. What do they want to get from your product or service?

Build a Job Story by thinking about your audience:

As a ______(who)______
when I am ______(situation)______
I want to ______(motivation)______
so I can ______(desired outcome)______

• Create Buyer Personas: Create a Buyer Persona based on the data you already have or by conducting interviews.
• Research Keywords:  Online search keywords say a lot about a person's experience and what they want to find when they do a search. Discover the basics of SEO.
• Develop the Buyer's Journey:Accompany your Buyer Personas along their journey, from the first touch to their decision to buy. You do this by offering value to your customers with quality content at the right place and time. 
• Use the right platform: Choose a Marketing and Design platform capable of performing all (or most) of the functions you need. This should have an easy CMS where you can create, manage and optimize your content.

2. Site Launch

In this stage, the development and launch of the new website is carried out. This will not be the final design, but it will be the base for construction and optimization, so it's a fundamental piece of GDD. 

The launch of this website will help you start getting real user data, save time, and achieve your ROI faster.

As this is a developmental phase, different structures and content options should be tested.

All relevant teams at your company should be included in this phase, as their involvement will make implementation and revision more agile, and the work will be get done faster and more efficiently.

3. Continuous improvements

With a website that collects real user data, you can begin to discover what actions have the greatest impact and how you can use these insights use to grow your business.

This stage is composed of a continuous circle of four phases that you must follow to make improvements to your page:

1. Plan: Determine what are the most impactful items to build or optimize at this point in time to drive you towards your goals.
2. Build: Work in sprint workshops to develop the high impact action and run experiments to test it.
3. Learn: Review the experiments to see what you have learned. Gain a deeper understanding of your users so you can make smarter future decisions and drive more value.
4. Transfer: To share learnings across departments and find opportunities to better align to create a better user experience throughout the entire customer journey. 
5. Repeatthe circle over and over again focusing on different work areas.

How do we apply Growth Driven Design in mbudo? 

At mbudo, we redesigned our website a few months ago and we did it using the Growth-Driven Design method. During the Strategy phase we gathered our entire team to share what we wanted to achieve with our new website, the behavioral data of our users, and we designed a strategy to lead us.

After the development phase, we launched our website, but not the final version. We continued to periodically analyze and optimize our site, introducing changes in structure and content as we learned the needs of our audience. Currently, we review our content and web pages every month along with user data to find out what our impact areas are and reinforce them.

At mbudo we also use the Growth-Driven Design methodology for the web development of our clients. Through an analysis of user behavior and a website audit, we propose new strategies based on content and structure.

As you have seen, Growth-Driven Design is a methodology that will help you obtain better web results in a more agile and efficient way. If you need help implementing GDD in your company, don't hesitate to contact us.