How to Build a Website With Growth-Driven Design

How does Growth Driven Design Work? The Growth Driven Design methodology has three major stages. First is the Strategy Stage. The goal of the Strategy Stage is to develop an empathetic understanding of your audience and how the website can solve problems along their journey. Try to imagine the world from your audience's perspective. Who are they? What what challenges are they facing? What are their goals, and where does the website fit in? As a part of that, there are several steps that you'll need to take to complete the Strategy Stage. First, define the website goals by reverse engineering the overall business goals and identifying how the website specifically will influence each one of them. The website goals should be smart, which is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely to help properly measure the website's impact on the business. Next, you'll need to understand your audience, so you'll have to do some user experience or UX research. The research may be qualitative, quantitative or observational, or it might be a combination in order to uncover user insights that guide you through through the rest of the Strategy stage. The next step is called Jobs to Be Done. This framework helps you identify the underlying needs and the desired outcomes that drive your audience and what it takes for them to switch to your company's products and services as a solution. Following the jobs to be done, you'll refine those into fundamental assumptions. This step involves boiling down what you already know about your market, about your business and about your website. You'll refine or create new user problem statements, unique value propositions, situational triggers, current user behavior, habits, switching anxieties and more. Fundamental assumptions are the core of what success is for your users, your business and and your website. The next step in the Strategy stage is to develop Personas using a deep understanding of the audience that you've gained through the previous steps. A Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Then you'll need to do journey mapping where you map out that Persona's journey and everything that happens before, during and after they interact with your business. By mapping your Persona's journey, you'll have a direction of how you can weave the website into that journey and solve problems along the way. After that, you'll develop a website specific strategy. These are probably what you're used to looking at for a website redesign. Things like site architecture, on site, SEO, key sections and pages, integrations, technical requirements, and more. The last step of the Strategy Stage for Growth Driven Design is that you brainstorm an initial wish list. This wishlist will contain creative and impactful website ideas that you can aim to solve user Challenges provide value for the user and ultimately help your business reach its goals. The website Wishlist will have anywhere between 75 and 200 different ideas and including site elements, sections, pages, specific features, modules, integrations and more. With a strong wish list of high impact ideas, you'll then begin the second phase of the growth driven design methodology which is the Launchpad Website. The goal of the Launchpad website is to quickly build a website that looks better and performs better than what you have today, but isn't the final product. Rather, the Launchpad is the foundation on which you build and optimize upon. The main driver for launching quickly without sacrificing quality is to collect user data from real users interacting with the actual site because then you're equipped to make better data driven decisions on how to improve the website. Launching quickly also creates a quicker time to value versus the three to six months of traditional web design rather than where you don't see any value from the business. How can you quickly build a Launchpad? Well, there are a few key areas that you could focus on to accelerate the launch of a remarkable and effective website. First, find a way to customize your approach to building that new website that maximizes acceleration while maintaining quality. These are a lot of process things that happen behind the scenes. Now there's a number of different ways you can make that happen and every website is uniquely different and requires a different mix of approaches to make sure that it's a well performing launchpad website. And this is where it can be helpful to work with an experienced partner agency to guide you on the best approach to launching your new Launchpad website. The second way you can accelerate a Launchpad website is by running design sprints on high impact pages and high impact sections. A design sprint is a short, concentrated, focused period of problem solving, design, prototype and testing. Design sprints allow your team to collectively share their knowledge, generate ideas, but also come to high quality prototypes of your new website in record time. Next, for anyone who's built a website in the past, you may know that developing high quality content, including text and images and video is probably the most challenging part of building a new website and it often causes huge delays. So having an effective content development process and great content collaboration tools can accelerate your content production speed and increase the quality of the content you produce. Now. The last way that you can accelerate the build of a Launchpad website is through investing in internal efficiencies. Internal efficiencies include switching from waterfall process to an agile or scrum process. Could be building an internal library of pre built templates and modules that you can reuse, removing developer dependencies so that marketers can make updates on their own, and leveraging collaboration tools. These are just a few of the ways to that you can invest in internal efficiencies. Once the strategy has been created, you have your launchpad website live. You'll move into the continuous improvement stage of the growth Driven design methodology. The goal of the continuous improvement stage is to start identifying the high impact action items that you can take to grow your business using real user data. And once you've launched the website, it may be difficult to stay focused on improving the highest impact items at any given time. So you can follow a simple yet powerful agile process of plan, build, learn and transfer. Let's take a look at each step in the planning step of the cycle. You'll define the most impactful items to build and optimize at this moment in time to drive us closer to our business goals. Now this starts by determining an area of focus that the team can rally around for their improvement efforts. Focus is absolutely key here folks. Now the challenge is that there are many areas that you could work on. Things like messaging, to layouts, to building new pages, to optimizing existing pages. The wide range of options can make it overwhelming or difficult to determine where is the best place for your team to focus their time. To solve this, you're going to use the Website Performance Roadmap. The Performance Roadmap is a framework for you and your team to ensure that you're spending your time and energy on improving the most impactful areas. The Roadmap helps you set clear expectations with your boss, with your stakeholders or clients on exactly what you should be working on and more importantly, what you should not be working on and why. This is because there are specific metrics to measure at every focus area and you can easily measure this report on your progress and build a peak performing website. So what does a performance Roadmap look like? Well, there are three major Establish, Optimize and Expand. The Establish theme revolves around the core foundational activities that you can do when you've built something new. Within this theme there are three focus areas. First, you could focus on harvesting low hanging fruit or building those high impact items that were easy or quick to accomplish right after you launch the site. Secondly, there's building an audience, getting people coming to the site so that you can collect data and run your experiments. And third, there's confirming that the website is driving value for those users. The Optymyze theme revolves around improving the user experience and the business performance of existing items on the site. The three focus areas under Optimize include improving usability on the site to ensure that visitors can unlock that value as quick as possible, doing conversion rate optimization or CRO to reduce the friction or the steps within your conversion funnels on your website and personalization to provide a hyper relevant experience for each user or user segment to ensure that they have the perfect experience for their needs. And lastly, the Expand theme revolves around building new items onto the site that expand the impact the website has. The three focus areas within the Expand theme include building new digital products onto the website. These could be things like tools, directories, digital resources or interactive experiences. The second focus area is expanding into developing new items on the site that improve other areas of the journey map such as new customer experience. Could be a customer facing website or maybe an advocate program. And the third focus area in Expand is using the website to help other teams achieve their goals and and grow the business. This could be building items on the website to help the sales team prospect qualify and close deals. It could be helping the HR team recruit more qualified candidates and retain current employees. Or maybe helping the customer service team reduce support tickets and inbound calls and retain your existing customers. There are many ways in which you can use the website as a tool to help the entire company grow. The Website Performance Roadmap is ordered to match the lifecycle of a particular website. After you launch your initial launchpad website, oftentimes you focus on establishing and optimizing themes and over time you'll be able to progress and start focusing on the Expand theme. But every website is different and that's why it's key that you let both your performance metrics and and your experience guide you on where your team should focus. Each and every quarter you should reassess. How do you divide your continuous improvement efforts between different focus areas on performance metrics? Once your quarterly focus area is set, it's important not to shift. Shifting focus can create a lot of motion and actually very little progress on individual improvements. Once you've determined your focus area, it's time to complete user experience research or UX research to understand what challenges or friction points on the website users are running into that's preventing them on making progress. And once you have a good understanding of those challenges, your team will brainstorm all sorts of new action items to build. These items will drive user value while at the same time improving performance metric of the current focus area. All ideas that you come up with should relate to that team's current Focus area with your list of brilliant ideas. It's now time to prioritize that list in order to identify the highest impact action items you can implement right now to boost performance in that focus area. Then you have to consider your workload, your capacity, and you're going to go down that list and select the highest impact action items until you run out of capacity. Anything after will be considered the next time you come around and do your planning in your next cycle. With those high impact action items in hand for your current sprint, we then go on to writing out action item cards which has four different elements. 1. You outline a specific customer scenario in the form of a job statement. 2. A hypothesis statement about the proposed change and the impact it will have. 3. Any research or data that will help back up that hypothesis and 4 the experimental design of how you plan on testing that hypothesis. Now that you have a focus and prioritized action items to implement, you can move to the second step in the continuous improvement cycle, the Build step. The goal of the Build step is to host a working sprint with a cross functional team to complete all of those high impact action items. And just like a sports team, your team will swarm on any of the action items to collaboratively tackle them with aggression. With those action items and their focus, they'll be in sync schedules, meetings, work times. In addition to building those action items, the team will also need to set up experiments as outlined in the experimental design. This is in order to properly measure the impact those actions have and either validate or invalidate your original hypothesis. You'll launch what you built. You'll let your audience interact with your experiments and after a period of time, which could be different for every experiment, you'll then move on to the Learn step of the cycle. In the Learn step, you're going to take a step back in order to review the experiments that you're running and extract user learnings about what you've seen your users interacting with. Was your original hypothesis correct or did you prove it wrong? If it was proven wrong, and this is okay, it's fairly common, especially when you're first starting out and trying different bold ideas. It's critical that you assess why did it go wrong? Assess those outcomes to learn more about your audience. What did their actions or behaviors tell you about them and how could you incorporate these learnings into future action items? This is such a critical step because as you repeat this cycle and you learn more and more about your audience, the more likely you're going to have success in providing value and hitting those goal metrics. The final step in the continuous improvement cycle is the Transfer step. The goal of the transfer step is to share your learnings and exchange ideas throughout the entire company in order to improve the entire business, not just one of the parts between internal communications and meetings. You'll be able to share those user learnings from the experiments you performed in that previous month. You can make recommendations to other teams based on the things that you've learned and where they could possibly improve. You can ask questions to those other departments in order to pull insights and fill gaps within your user research. You can also use this time to talk about creating a more consistent user experience throughout all the interactions within your company. You could look for possible collaboration opportunities with other departments and other teams. And this is a cycle because you'll continually repeat these steps, building momentum every single time you repeat them. Generally, the cycle is repeated every two weeks with new action items being built to impact that current focus for the quarter. Eventually you learn and improve enough that the focus area you meet that specific goal and at that point you can move on to a new theme or new focus on the performance roadmap and start the cycle again. To recap, the growth driven design methodology starts with planning and researching in the strategy stage, which then concludes in the creation of a solid wish list. This wish list is then built into a launchpad website. In this stage you're building a website that looks and performs better than what you have today, but is just your starting point for your website's success. And then you'll start the continuous improvement stage where month over month you're improving based off of real user data. This process is a great alternative for the existing nightmare of a launch and the set it and forget it of traditional web design. Now you're continuously improving, using the website to help all aspects of the business grow and seeing results each and every month. Of course, marketing and sales are a layer that lives on top of growth driven design. Think of growth driven design like a sports car, but you still need gas for that sports car to go. And that's what marketing and sales are. To develop a peak performing growth business, you need to develop all three elements working together. They're all interconnected and they all feed off each other. All of the challenges associated with the broken traditional web design process are now solved with this new playbook. Growth Driven Design. This is the future of web design and the playbook for building a peak performing website. Hopefully you feel inspired to grow as a marketer, grow as a web designer, to grow out of the broken traditional web design process to start building peak performing websites using growth driven design. Let's transform the world of web design together.