Growth-driven design, it’s the right stuff. It’s the new kid on the block shaking up the web design and development industry because “traditional web design” is dead, or at least should be.
Traditional web design is the process in which you're probably use to. Picture this. You go to an agency, spend 40 grand on a website re-design that ends up taking way longer than expected and isn’t the conversion machine you were hoping for. The site remains static with no real updates or changes for over 2 years and at this point it’s out of date and performs terribly.
So what do you do? Another website re-design. This time you and your team are hoping the website project won’t go over budget, will be delivered on time, and produce better results, but will it? No.
So this never ending loop of designing and re-designing your site goes on and on until you start to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog day wondering when the madness will end. Why does this happen? Because the process is broken and useless.
Traditional web design projects are built on assumptions, not real data. The decisions made around a traditional website re-design are at best educational guesses on what you the client, and we the agency, think will drive conversion.
Then the site is launched and lies untouched for around two years and depending on whether or not it performs well, another re-design is implemented. Thus the whole ridiculous process starts yet again.
At The Jibe, we’ve always been an adaptive agency, preferring to focus on providing value and outcomes based on data and research rather than being influenced by trends and features. This way of thinking is exactly what Growth Driven Design is all about.
Growth driven design is an iterative approach that focuses on making small, continuous changes to a website based on real customer data. It can be compared to Agile in that instead of trying to deliver a project all at once near the end, small incremental changes are made from the very start of the project.
Instead of burdening oneself with the task of creating a brand new website every two years based on assumptions, and then launching a “final” website after months of hard work with no real way of knowing how it will perform, with GDD a website is launched quickly and then improved upon by testing, and gathering research from actual visitors to the website.
GDD takes away any guesswork, allowing both you and your development agency to make educated decisions based on testing, continual learning and data gathered from real people.
Taken from Hubspot, the following graphs are a visual comparison of traditional web design methods and Growth Driven Design.
With the GDD methodology, the pains you experience with traditional design virtually disappear, and all the ways in which you’ll benefit are immense. The following are 3 of the main areas in which you’ll do so.
Save Time While enterprise projects can take a minimum of 4 months or longer to complete, with GDD a website is launched in as little as 4-8 weeks. The idea behind this rationale is that the design will be continuously improved upon once there is sufficient data that shows what areas need improvement.
Save Money Re-doing your entire website every 2 years is costly and shouldn't have to be done. With GDD, instead of a high overhead cost, as well as unexpected expenses if the project runs over time, you know where and how your money is being spent. In addition, many agencies will bill you on a monthly basis allowing you to budget accordingly. This process minimizes the risk of a future re-design and shelling out another 40 grand on a website that doesn’t convert.
Increase Sales GDD takes away the guesswork and personal opinions. Your website is being built and backed by customer data. This allows you and your development agency to focus on what works, and what doesn’t, in order to consistently improve conversion.
In our next post we’ll dig into how Growth Driven Design works and the two phase process in which it follows.