So, you want to take your business to the next level. You want to digitally transform your business and transform it into an online powerhouse, utilising the tools of today to become the company of tomorrow. One way you can do this is through growth-driven design. But what exactly is growth-driven design?

What is Growth-Driven Design?

Growth-driven design is an agile development of a company with growth in mind. Growth-driven website design is one of the ways the company achieves this through continual, incremental changes. By keeping the user in mind and designing specifically for a better customer experience, companies that use growth-driven design are able to efficiently redesign parts of a website to better fit the needs of the user.

Rather than spending thousands of dollars and several months out of the year to build a new website for your users, growth-driven design continuously improves the website so that you can save money and time.

How does Growth-Driven Design Work?

Growth-driven design always starts with developing a strategy. In order to develop your strategy, you need to figure out what your goals are for the site. Do you want to bring in more traffic, sell more products, or maybe get more sign-ups for your newsletter?

After you have decided on the goals, take a look at what you have already done. How have your previous strategies helped you and how have you performed in the past? Next, you want to determine buyer personas. Who is the ideal visitor that shows up to your site?

Develop a Buyer Persona

This is a mandatory step. In order to properly implement growth-driven design, you need to know exactly who your target audience is. You need to have each buyer persona pinned down to the last detail, from where they like to shop to the small habits that they possess.

Talk to Your Users

Now, it’s time to talk to your users. First, figure out what your users think of your site. Get on the phone, distribute a survey–do whatever it takes to talk to these people so that you can understand where your site lacks in terms of quality.

But more than that, you also want to figure out who your users are. Learn what they like, what they don’t like, their habits, their pet peeves, and most importantly, how you can help them. Use your user’s feedback to reinforce and learn where your buyer personas stand in terms of your actual customer.

Audit Your Website

Next, you want to audit your website. I highly recommend using Google Analytics and Google Search Console for this step. Google Analytics will show you exactly what your users are doing, what pages they’re going to, and what pages they’re dropping off from. Meanwhile, Google Search Console will show you exactly where your users originate.

Auditing your website will help you discover your website’s flaws while also helping you determine a broad strategy to help you improve. Auditing websites and doing user research hand-in-hand really helps you pinpoint with laser focus where your site needs to be fixed and the strategy that can be used to attain optimal success.

Determine What You Want For Your Website

This is where you build your wishlist. It’s time to figure out what your website needs based on what your users are saying and what your audit shows. In order to do so, you must only focus on what your future website should look like.

Don’t dwell on what your website once was. Plan for what your website can become. Look at every technical, creative, and monetizable aspect you want to bring to your new website and list them out.

Here are some areas that you can look at to get you started:

• Core site pages that can/will bring in a large chunk of traffic
• Marketing resources
• New features for the website
• Design features
• User experience on mobile, desktop, and tablet.

Determining exactly what you want for your website should take a few hours and by the end of it, you should have anywhere from 20-100+ ideas that you can implement on your website. Not all of these will be used, but they’ll help you apply an action plan right away and you can use more of these ideas as you move forward.

Create Your Launch Pad Site

Now, it’s time to get started on launching your site. With growth-driven design, we are going to be continually optimising the site so the first launch does not have to be perfect. It’s important that we aren’t too caught up in site structure, content, or visual appearance.

What exactly is a launch pad site? As its name suggests, a launch pad site is the first version of your website – the foundation and groundwork for which all the exciting products and content to come will launch from.

The goal is to get your launch pad site out and continue learning more about what your users want and optimising the website. That said, pick out your most essential ideas and launch them as soon as possible with the launch pad site.

Remember, the goal of a launch pad site is to continuously improve the experience for the user. You’re not supposed to have a perfect website on the first launch. As you move forward, you will continually add more and more features and redesigns that your users love.

Growth-Driven Website Design vs Traditional Web Development

So, what’s the big difference between growth-driven website design and traditional web development. The main differences between growth-driven website design and traditional website development is the time to launch and the final product.

With traditional website development, once the website has been finalised, it’s done. There’s nothing more to it. The time to launch is also longer since everything is done before the website is launched.

With growth-driven website design, the website is not finalised from the first launch and the time to launch is much shorter. Instead, growth-driven website design ensures that the website is continuously optimised and improved based on user preferences.

This allows for more flexibility as adjustments can be easily made, if and when they are needed. On the other hand, with traditional web development, if adjustments need to be made, chances are these adjustments will take a great deal of time before they can be finalised.

Website Launch Pad vs Traditional Websites

Should you use a website launch pad or should you stick with a traditional website design? If you want shorter launch times and improve-as-you-go optimisation, then a website launch pad is the best choice for you.

However, if you’re okay with longer development periods in exchange for more features present in your first and final design and do not intend to update your website frequently, then you’ll probably want to go with a traditional website.

Our only caveat at MWKA Tech with traditional website design is that if you want to change something with your website down the road, it’s going to take more time and money than if you had gone with a website launch pad.

Benefits of Growth-Driven Design

Growth-driven design is a fast-paced, innovative website design process that can sometimes be daunting to some companies or web agencies. However, there are several benefits that come with growth-driven design. Most tellingly, you are likely to see the benefits of a launch pad website quicker than a traditional website as the launchpad website would deliver value incrementally, in an agile manner.

Continuous Improvement

The biggest, and most obvious, benefit of growth-driven design is the opportunity to continuously improve your website. The growth-driven design model allows businesses to spend less time and money on updating and refining features of their website since the website isn’t set in stone and is constantly evolving.

Think of it this way. Traditional websites are based on user assumption. They’re based on what companies assume a user will do when they’re on a site. growth-driven design websites are based on user insight. They’re constantly adapting to what the user wants, resulting in better performance.

Shared User Insight

Now, we mentioned user insight but there’s more to it than seeing what a user is doing and adapting based on their behaviour. User insights can be shared with sales and marketing teams to make real-time decisions together, allowing for a much more holistic workflow.

Minimised Risk

When you work with a traditional website design, you carry a lot of risk with the final product. There are hefty costs into the design itself, substantial time requirements, and complicated day-to-day procedures.

Furthermore, the final product is built towards an assumption of what the users will do when they enter your site. So, if the users don’t do the assumed behaviour, that’s time and money lost on your end. In the tech world, we call these unvalidated assumptions. The goal really is to validate your assumptions as early as possible.

Growth-driven design minimises the time and money put into the website initially. You can expect a launch pad site to be up within weeks or 1-3 months at most. Then, the costs of maintaining, updating, and improving the website are spread out over a longer period of time.

When compared to a traditional website, where you have to wait months for a design that might be outdated, growth-driven design websites ensure that your website is up-to-date and ready to perform for a fraction of the cost.

Final Thoughts

Here at MWKA Tech, we firmly believe in using growth-driven design as a way to help our clients grow. It saves them money, time, and stress. Rather than spending thousands of dollars upfront and waiting months on end for a potentially outdated website, growth-driven design allows you to continuously update and modify your website to your user’s liking. We highly recommend checking out this form of website redesign if you’re looking to minimise risk and produce efficient results.

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Pricing

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, we are dedicating a significant amount of time to support small businesses and families around the world. In order to alleviate the financial strain start-ups

Growth-driven website design packages start from SGD430 / RM1,300/ USD300 / EUR270 per month for startups whilst packages for Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Associations who have more needs start from SGD990 / RM 3099/ USD730/ EUR615 per month. A 10% discount is available to all annual subscriptions (paid upon commencement).

For a complimentary consultation, please contact us at hello@mwka.tech or schedule an appointment on our calendar here. Alternatively, request for a proposal here.

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MWKA Technologies is a remote-friendly agile strategy and innovation boutique consultancy. We empower clients in Europe + Asia Pacific to unlock 10x value by transforming customer experience + facilitating sustainable change + continuous innovation.

We are a diverse team of experienced IT, legal, finance & compliance professionals who have the mindset, skillset and commercial acumen you need to help you succeed.