In the last installment of our Minneapolis Web Design series we went over the first of two phases in the Growth-Driven Design process. Phase 1 is all about developing a rock solid strategy and wish list and then getting up a launch pad website as quickly as possible. The GDD process is a prototype with proven success and can turn your website into a lead generating machine.
In our third installment of our Minneapolis Web Design series, we continue to discuss the GDD process and focus on Phase 2: The Growth-Driven Design Cycle. Please join the conversation by commenting on this blog below and remember to subscribe to our blog at the bottom of the page!
growth driven design process
phase 2: the growth-driven design cycle
Once your your launch pad website goes live, it is time to start your on-gong cycles to continuously experiment, learn and improve your website. Coming out of your launch pad website stage, you will have a long wish list of impactful items that you'd like to implement on the site. This list is agile and should be updated on a regular website.
This entire cycle starts with and revolves around the personas who are coming to your website. At each stage of the cycle, we must continuously ask ourselves how this relates and provides value to the personas visiting your website. At any point if it ever becomes unclear how an action item provides value to, or relates to the persona, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate what you're working on.
Cycle Step 1 - Plan
The first step of the GDD cycle is planning. In this step, you will be identifying the most impactful items at the current moment. Plan to implement the top ones into the current cycle. There are a number of steps to go through in the planning phase:
- Performance vs. Goals
- Additional Data or Research
- Learning from Marketing & Sales
- Boost Conversions
- Improve User Experience
- personalize to the User
- Build Marketing Assets
- General Updates
- Brainstorm and Prioritize Wish list
Plan sprint cycle: Once you have all the new items added to your wish list, you will then prioritize all the action items based on the impact they will have on the goals for the website and value to the user. The number of items you pick will depend on how long the cycle is. You're better off picking less items and really focusing on doing your best work with them. If you happen to complete early, you can always go back to your wish list and pick more.
cycle step 2 - Develop
Moving into the develop phase of the cycle, you now have the most impactful action items to work on and its time to start implementing them on the site. This is where everyone on your team gets together to start completing each action item that you selected in Cycle Step 1. Each action item that you implement should be considered an experiment to see the impact it has on the performance of your website. To measure your experiments, you must setup validation tracking around the metrics outlined on the action item.
After your experiment goes live, you need to develop a marketing campaign to drive traffic to that section of the site so you can start collecting data. During the develop phase of the cycle, you will build and schedule that marketing campaign while working with your marketing team.
cycle step 3 - learn
After the experiments that you developed in Cycle Step 2 have had enough time to run and collect data, it is then time to move on to the learn phase. In the learning phase you are going to review the information you collected about your website visitors. Based on all of the information you collected, you can then validate or disprove your hypothesis on your action item. Did your change have the specific impact that you had expected and why did or didn't it? Based on the results, what did this teach you about your visitor? What did you learn about your visitor that you didn't know before?
After you have determined whether or not your hypothesis was correct and documented what you've learned about your users, you will then want to publish this information and share it with everyone within your organization. That way they will be able to take advantage of this useful information.
Cycle Step 4 - Transfer
The last step in the cycle is to transfer any impactful information you've learned in your cycle to other parts of your business. It is important to take your time to review what you've learned from each completed action item and brainstorm how this may be useful for others. Remember to review previously completed action items to see if you can find any patterns about your users/visitors. Once you have put together your recommendations for others within the organization, host a meeting to educate them and brainstorm ways they can integrate and transfer these ideas into tactical action items.
Once you've completed the cycle, the most important thing of the GDD process is REPEAT!!! Go back to the beginning and start planning your next cycle. The cycle is meant to repeat itself over and over again, each time with a better end result and more learning about your visitors. The more cycles you can complete, the more impact your website is going to have.
As you can see, GDD is a systematic approach to web design that is never ending. You are always striving for better results and to continuously learn more about your users/visitors. In our fourth installment of our Minneapolis Web Design series, we will be discussing some of the powerful e-commerce options available for our favorite open source content management system, WordPress.
As always, thank for taking the time for reading this blog post! If you are looking for more information on GDD, check out our blog post "Minneapolis Web Design: Growth-Driven Design vs. Traditional Design" for an overview of both methodologies and why you should consider GDD for your next website redesign.
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