Traditional web design is slowly becoming obsolete. Along with demanding a massive array of resources like a design team, a good budget and hard-to-meet deadlines, it also puts a lot of stress and doubt in the minds of designers.
How the new design will be perceived by the user base, whether or not the changes made were necessary are questions that frustrate designers and often make them doubt their work. This even sometimes leads to them becoming comfortable with the present design until it becomes grossly outdated and impacts their business. Here’s where GDD or Growth-Driven Design comes into play.
GDD eliminates most of these risks and makes the design process more streamlined and manageable. Combining agile and effective principles in a data-driven design model makes it a fool proof way to design your next website. Here are a few tips that can help you understand and implement GDD in the future:
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GDD vs. Traditional Design
This is now becoming a widespread argument among designers. Depending on what approach they follow, every designer will confidently claim that their way is superior to the other. In reality, GDD has the statistics and the data to back its claim that it is indeed the best way to redesign your website. You can also find a web design agency that is willing to transition your website from conventional to GDD.
Traditional web design follows a mundane pattern that is generally full of risk. You invest resources and time for months before you are finally ready to go live. On the day of the launch, everybody is staring at their screens hoping that their efforts will be translated correctly. This is mostly because the online identity of your company depends solely on the success of that website. Also, once the site is live, it’s out there open to consumer perceptions and critiques. There is no way of guaranteeing that your design will not need to be changed completely even in two months just because your competition has gotten ahead.
With GDD your website is never really “finished”. It helps you with your initial launch as it requires lesser pages to launch. This drastically reduces the design time. Once the site is live, monthly updates can easily be given to the site to ensure that it maintains relevancy. It is also easy to gather data about general user behaviour like where your users get stuck, where the browsing experience can be enhanced and what parts of your website are working as desired. This data is invaluable as it can help understand what needs to be done in the following month.
Introducing a Strategy
To achieve any long-term goal, it is pivotal to have a strong strategy in place. This helps your team to stay focused while making sure that they are all working towards a single collective objective. Set realistic, specific and measurable goals as the first step towards creating a strong GDD strategy. Once the goals are in place, it can help to visualise and create personas for the type of users that your website is targeting. Once an image is set, it is much easier to influence design decisions for your specific audience. Performing good data research and UX research on your present website will make it clear where the flaws in your website lie and what to avoid in your new design.
Launchpad Phase
This is the part of GDD that puts it ahead of conventional design models. Creating a launchpad website involves setting up the core webpages that will be launched in the early stages of your design. If this was to be done traditionally, it would take months of error handling and many more pages ultimately slowing down your launch. Aside from the cost benefits of finishing your initial design in almost half the time, GDD also allows you to immediately start collecting data that can be used to improve the next iteration of the design. Using the launchpad phase, along with a good enterprise SEO campaign can fuel the growth of your website exponentially.
Consistent Optimisation
Without making constant changes and collecting inference from fresh data at regular intervals, it is very hard to benefit from GDD. With this approach towards design, you’re always learning, both about your user behavior and your design flaws. If your website is not constantly evolving, there will never be observable growth. Even though there are designers that swear by their ways of web design, adapting to the newest and most efficient techniques is the only way to gain an edge over the competition. It’s time to venture outside your comfort zone and try something that can provide numerous benefits to your company by making just a few changes in the way your website is designed!
