Build Better Websites With Growth Driven Design

Your website is the most important marketing asset you have. It’s the first place people go when looking for information about your business and the only place online that you have 100% control over.

So why do so many websites end up underperforming and underwhelming? It’s because the traditional way of building websites is broken.  Fortunately, there’s a better way. Welcome to Growth Driven Design.

Why is the traditional web design process broken?

People have been building websites the same way for years. They make a list of things they think their customers want and then spend months building a website without seeing any results until it’s 100% finished and ready to launch.

This approach is risky and often leads to the design process going over time and over budget.

Worst yet, once a website is completed, it’s pronounced “Done” and left without any changes being implemented until it’s due for a redesign in a couple of years time.

Expecting a website to work effectively on day one is like sending a salesperson into the field without a lick of training. We all know how that is going to end up.

Why is Growth Driven Design a better framework?

Growth Driven Design is based on agile methodologies and follows the concept that you launch a website quickly and continuously improve it over time.

Your “launch pad” website needs to be built around user research and should only contain the bare number of features required to get it up and running. From there you can add more and more features as they’re developed.

This method enables you to get a website live in the market far quicker than the traditional approach and results in a site that your customer actually want due to it being based on customer research.

How do I get started in growth driven design?

Growth driven design is broken into multiple different phases. Let’s take a look at what each one entails:

1. 1. Strategy – The strategy phase is when you set the goals for your website, create personas of your target market and conduct qualitative and quantitative research about your customers and your market.
   2. Wishlist – Based on your research, create a wishlist of all the features you want to include on your website. List all the features from most important to least important.
   3. Launch Pad Website – Your Launch Pad website is the bare minimum website you can launch for it to work and be a success. The rule of thumb is to take the first 20% of features from your wishlist and those will make up what your launchpad website will be.
   4. Continuous Improvement –  Once your Launch Pad website is complete, you can start adding the rest of your wishlist features to it week in and week out. At this stage, it’s important to start gathering data about how people are using your website and make changes based on the facts and figures.

Where do I learn more about growth driven design?

The Growth Driven Design process was made popular among web designers by Hubspot who launched the Growth Driven Design information hub and certification. To dive deeper you can also look into Scrum and Agile Methodology which has been employed by software development teams for years.