THE THREE PHASES
Much like the traditional website design process, the first stage of Growth-Driven Design is the strategy stage.
In this stage we’ll develop a rock-solid foundation that we can build our Growth-Driven Design process upon using the following steps:
Goals: What are the performance goals that we are trying to achieve with our website? How have we historically performed, where would we like to improve and how will this impact the overall marketing department’s goal?
For help with setting and tracking goals, download HubSpot’s free S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) marketing goals Excel template.
Personas: Next you will develop detailed persona profiles for the different types of groups visiting the site.
A persona is a representation of your ideal customer. You can create different groups of personas based on common characteristics your audience shares. This could be a pain point, industry, job title, etc.
As you’ll learn later in the book, Growth-Driven Design centres around the user, so it is critically important to fully research and develop your persona profiles in the beginning, as they will set the stage for all future activities.
It’s time to start digging into the data. Perform a quantitative audit of how the existing website is performing, reviewing what is, and is not, performing well, where users are dropping off, etc.
As you are completing your website audit, you will start identifying where there is opportunity for improvements for your future web work.
“As marketers and designers, website users are constantly signaling to us what they like and don’t like about our websites through the actions they take.
Quantitative research is when we listen to our users by collecting data for these actions and interpret in aggregate what the data means about our user base, product or service.
Through interpreting our quantitative data, we can make informed design decisions around what we can improve, how we can improve it and relatively how much impact our improvement can have. We can then test our changes with an experiment and use our quantitative data to measure the results.”
After you have identified some of the areas of opportunity through your audit, the next step is proactively reaching out to your existing users to learn more about them, gain a better understanding of who they are and find ways to improve.
As you’re collecting new user research, it will help you validate the assumptions you put in your original persona profiles and will likely give you additional information to include.
“We observe the user’s goals, motivations, and pain points in action. This helps us to develop an understanding for consumer behaviours online that are tied to the quantitative data points that we’ve collected.
The result is greater empathy with the human on the other side of the screen and an enhanced user experience. In turn, our clients see key performance indicators like conversion and retention rates improve”
Using what you’ve learned in all previous steps, you can now start forming some fundamental assumptions about your users.
Some examples of fundamental assumptions include:
These fundamental assumptions will help you explain the behavior and motivations of your users and will be influential in both the global and page strategy and future Growth-Driven Design cycles.
The last step in the strategy phase is to develop both a global strategy for the website as a whole and a specific strategy for each major page on the site.
Both the global and individual page strategies should incorporate all previous steps and lay out a detailed strategy of exactly how to best engage and influence the user to attain your goals.
The next stage in the Growth-Driven Design process is developing your wishlist.
Taking what you’ve learned in your strategy planning, gather your team together and brainstorm every impactful, creative and innovative idea that you’d like to include on the site.
The key is to come into your brainstorming session with a “clean slate” and to not get hung up on the existing website.
Think about what items should be on the list to achieve your goals in an ideal world if money, time and development skill were not an issue.
This includes brainstorming ideas such as:
After a few hours of brainstorming with the team you will have a list of 50-150+ ideas for the new website. Not all of these items will be implemented right away, however.
But it’s important to flesh out as many ideas as possible right off the bat.
Your wishlist will be used both to determine the initial action items to implement on the new site, but is also an agile and flexible list that you will continuously be adding to (and subtracting from) as you are re-prioritising action items over time.
In the traditional web design process we think of the launching of the website as the finish. In Growth-Driven Design it is the complete opposite.
In this stage we will be building and launching what we call a “Launchpad website”. This Launchpad website is the starting point on which all other Growth-Driven Design activities and improvements start from.
The Launchpad website should be launched quickly and will not be perfect. We want to avoid getting stuck on analysis, features or content while building our Launchpad website.
It may not be perfect on launch, but no website is. It will likely be a big improvement to your current website and give a starting point for which you can continuously improve from.
The size and complexity of the Launchpad website will vary depending on what you have on your wishlist and what type of website you have. However, it’s extremely important that you’re able to boil it down to the essential 20% that will make an impact and launch quickly so you can continue to learn about your users and improve the site.
In the wishlist phase we compiled a long list of all the action items we’d ideally want on the site. Now it is time to start sorting and prioritising these wishlist items to determine which action items are the first ones to implement on our Launchpad website.
Review the list with your entire team and identify the 20 percent of items that will produce 80 percent of the impact and value for your website’s users. Once you have identified those core 20 percent of items, pull them to the side and do some additional filtering by asking yourself, is this action item…
Then with the remaining items ask:
The goal of asking these additional questions is to really narrow your focus to just the core, 'Must Have' action items that will provide the most impact. It’s essential to narrow down to these core action items to ensure a quick launch.
Once we have narrowed down our list of action items for the Launchpad website down to the core 20% most impactful, 'must have' items, you will then create a “hypothesis statement” for each one of the action items.
The hypothesis statement allows us to gain clarity on how each action item relates back to the goals we’re trying to achieve, the persona we’re focusing on and the expected impact this change or update will have.
