How Growth Driven Design in Web Development Can Get Your Online Business Skyrocketing?

Written by Sharoon Emmanuel

Having a digital presence is no longer optional for businesses, it is imperative for sustainable growth both in the B2C and B2B space. Your website is undoubtedly the first place a new prospect interacts with your company. 

Since web design is subjective, no longer do the traditional design practices apply. A design that seems pleasing to one may prove to be terrible for someone else.  In today's personalized world, businesses to develop a website that engages the users and makes available every piece of important information at their disposal.

risk

Businesses need to understand that a website is not for them rather for the user. When looking for web designing companies in Dubai, always choose a digital media agency that doesn’t take opinions and ego drive into consideration in the development process. Relying on preconceived notions and intuition will only result in disastrous outcomes as today’s world calls for applying actionable items based on data.

traditional-growth

How Can You Opt for A Data-Driven Approach in Website Development?

Using great tools such as Hotjar, Google Analytics and Tag Manager, you can learn how your visitors are interacting with your company’s website. Leveraging these insights, you can begin to uncover ways to improve the experience. This data-driven approach to website design & development is known as Growth-Driven Design and is the foundation of planning to release a launch pad website and then building upon that.

Why Growth Driven Design is the Way Forward?

Fast, Flexible and Focused

The GDD approach ensures that your website serves your visitors in coherence with the business goals. Instead of just making a visually appealing website design, GDD focuses on engagement based on real-time data collected from real users.

As technology moves at a fast pace, spending 6-9 months in core development wouldn’t be of any benefit. Growth-Driven Design emphases on the principles of launching fast so that you can collect the data you need to make the finalized product that’s much better than the previous one.

Progressive web development companies in Dubai focus on developing launch a “launch pad" site or a minimal viable project or MVP with the goal of gauging the reaction of the visitors and collect data on what they like and dislike. This collected data then defines the next phase of the project.  

As Peter Drucker’s said, “You can't manage what you don't measure.”

Unlike other traditional and formal approaches, growth-driven design gives you the ability to steer the direction as needed.

Here, it is important to mention that flexibility is key to developing products and services that provide immense value to the end user. Also, having a clearly defined destination is important for sustainable growth.

Having a cool website is not the goal, developing a site that increases leads and sales by a specific number of percentage in a defined period of time is an example of a goal. Your objective when considering to hire a web development company in Dubai should be focused and must include a system that tracks and recognizes areas of improvement.

Insights: - Why Cultivating an Online Presence is Important for Businesses?

Numbers Explain It All

Following are some of the stats you should consider while developing a user-focused, growth-driven website.

  • Users develop a perception about a company or brand within the very first 10 secs of their visit.
  • 44% of website visitors will leave a website if there's no contact information available.
  • Each second of delay in website loading results in 35% of web users’ abandonment and 7% loss in conversions.
  •  48% of users say that when they land on the mobile version of the website and it isn’t functioning well, they take it as an indication of carelessness.
  • Value-based exit pop-ups are found to increase conversions, regardless of the fact you think users hate them.

Understanding the Growth-Driven Design Methodology

The GDD can be segregated in the following two phases.

  • Strategy and launch pad phase
  • Iterative development and continuous improvement phase 

Phase One: Strategy and Launch Pad

phase one

Strategy & Buyer Personas

The GDD process begins with strategygoal identification and buyer persona identification so you get a clear idea of whom you’re trying to connect, what they like, and what they care about most.

Website Audit

Carrying out quantitative research through a website and analytics audit will help you explore how users are arriving at your site, interacting with it, and why they’re bouncing.

Gathering user feedback and discovering pain points, this extensive research will help you evaluate what opportunities there are to augment user experience on the new site.

Find out what triggers users to come to your site, the value proposition they receive, their assessment criteria, device usability and areas from where they can access your website.

Wish List

Finally, you’ll finalize a wish list of everything you can think of to improve and increase the performance of your website. This could include new modules, integrations, new design, navigational features, functionality or additional pages.

When creating a wish list always go with an 80 / 20 approach, where you’ll carry out 20% of the action that will encourage 80% of the impact.

At this point, you wanna consider nice-to-have versus must-have analysis while including the following steps: -

  • Crafting content
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframing and design
  • Programming and development
  • UX testing

You’ll also be considering data collection ideas while wireframing to ensure that you’re moving in the right direction. The next step would include launching the website and begin collecting data that will inform the next step in the iterative GDD process.

Related: - Web designing companies in Dubai

Important Points To Consider

  • Building Parts for the Marketing Machine: Just as businesses have key assets such as machines or softwares, similar is the case for your website. Your social media accounts and blog are additional assets you can use to increase brand awareness and traffic that directly help you convert more.  Integrating marketing tools will allow you to receive a detailed report of links, traffic and lead flows thus enabling you to make necessary amendments based on data.
  • Uncover Conversion Boosting Opportunities: Focus on content conversion opportunities, user-paths and flows, conversion points, split testing, value propositions on the site and A/B testing.
  • UX Augmentation:  Look for areas where navigation and tagging system needs to be improved. Also, better search, filtering functionality, suggestions, mobile experience and placement of user interface buttons plays a critical role in this phase.
  • User-Based Personalization: As a professional web design agency in Dubai, we urge our clients to focus on personalization when connecting with their target audience. Instead of displaying similar content to all groups, they should segment the list of their contacts and showcase tailored messages based on the user’s geographic characteristics and intent. While implementing the” Smart Content Functionality, make sure to conduct monthly or weekly sessions to find out the behavior of users on your website, how they demonstrated interest, or previous actions taken.

Insights: - Web Development Guide: 3 Basic Factors to Consider for Creating a Strong Digital Presence

Wrapping Up Phase One

Next up, create Action Item Hypothesis Statements for every action item you’ll be testing. Here’s an example to help you learn how a buyer persona should be treated when reaching a specific page.

action-item

Use these hypothesis action items to collect critical metrics for the success of your GDD website. Your redesign decisions should be based on previous experiments, UX data, previously-validated assumptions and feedback from your sales and marketing teams.

Phase Two: Iterative Expansion and Ongoing Improvement

phsae two

To achieve peak performance, businesses need to continuously iterate & improve each month based on insights collected.  Requiring a fundamental shift from the traditional website redesign approach, phase two of Growth Driven Design will focus on ongoing improvement & validation.

As a leading web design agency in Dubai, we encourage businesses to discover how site updates will impact the visitor at every instance.

The phase two of Growth Driven Design website development requires the following four steps: -

1. Planning

As with everything, planning plays a crucial role in web development. In this phase, you have to figure out what needs to be accomplished during a specific sprint cycle by comparing your site’s performance against goals.

For this purpose, you’ll need to gather data from your sales and marketing teams so that you may address pain points that resonate with your audience. Utilizing the collected data, you can better reflect your visitors interest and come up with ways for improvement.

2. Development

Next up you’ll define deliverables required for the website based on user feedback working with the developers, marketers and sales people etc. During this step, setup validation tracking codes on your site to measure success metrics to develop targeted marketing campaigns to drive traffic to the newly added pages.

3. Learn & Transfer

Review data from your experiments to decide whether you need to validate or kill the assumptions made previously. Have the results published so that your team members are informed about future monthly sprint cycles. By doing so, you’ll facilitate data-driven decision-making amongst the C-suite of your organization. This exercise will help you expand your website wish list based on findings and learning.

The GDD’s iterative process works in conjunction with strategies to help you accomplish your desired outcomes.

Readers May Also Like: - 13 Advance Web Design & Development Elements You Should Consider in 2019

How Growth-Driven Design & Development Services Are Essential for Businesses in Dubai?

Following the GDD approach helps to develop a tweaked-up version of a website for minimized risk, endlessly learn and improve, and inform your marketing and sales decisions.

Having key data at their disposal, businesses can apply best practices into the redesign planning process. Reducing the number of assumptions, it enables them to create a stronger jump-off point.

Leveraging this data, brands can also integrate a number of tools and templates into their operating framework to ensure efficient performance.

Are There Any Shortcomings of Growth Driven Design?

While GDD may seem like the perfect solution, its efficiency depends on the business’s approach or digital media agency dealing it.

For instance, some GDD supporters recommend starting with a launch pad site that improves as you learn more about your target audience. A website not only needs to be quickly built but rather be functional altogether.  Since website development is a time-intensive endeavor, having a practical launch pad is a tough nut to crack, especially for enterprises having multiple divisions and product or service lines. So, sometimes even a scaled-down starter site isn’t the right option to go for.

Best Practices for Following the Growth Driven Design Approach

growth-driven-design

GDD works effectively with the agile methodology. Dividing projects into incremental sequences called “sprints”, it includes a premeditated amount of work in a short but realistic timeline. The agile methodology also focuses on reviewing existing work and adapting where required.

Identify user metrics and shortlist only the ones that matter most. Monitor these metrics regularly and perform user tests via heat mapping and recorded sessions to discover how users navigate your site, consume content and make purchasing decisions.

Also, setting clear expectations is important before even beginning to work.  You should take the time to explain all process to stakeholders to avoid misconceptions about timelines, scope or expected results.

Website design and development carried out with accordance to the principles of Growth-Driven Design tackles nearly shortcomings and creates a better user experience for your target audience.

Related: Web development companies in Dubai

Impact of Growth Driven Design on SEO

seo gdd

While allowing businesses to launch their website earlier, growth driven design not only creates a baseline to build upon but also helps to increase traffic, capture more connections and leads and eventually convert more.

With GDD, you can expect to see incremental increases in sessions over the course of time. Once you have your launch pad website ready, you can easily start seeing impacts of blogging, on page SEO, external linking and more.

With traditional web design, businesses can expect to see a viable drop in traffic as crawlers have to re-index the content. But for a GDD site, you won’t see a drop in traffic at all, infact the only thing you’ll experience is growth.

Since GDD is not a stagnant process, elements are always being adjusted here and there to meet the needs of the users.

GDD also allows you to expand your keyword universe by finding the most productive long-tailed keyword phrases and how visitors are interacting with them. By discovering more keyword opportunities, you can continue to grow your site’s organic reach. If done right, your website can organically become a reliable source in your niche, meaning you’ll have better traffic that converts.

An important point to consider here is that GDD doesn’t follow a “one size fits all” approach, you have to craft your strategy according to buyer personas and identify channels of communication to better reach them. Success is never a tradeoff; you have to balance every aspect to make it happen. Try to discover the challenges that your buyers might have and try to solve them, cause eventually, it is all about your user being catered in the right way.

Let’s Take You on the Growth Driven Ride with Our Web Design & Development Services

If you’re facing monumental challenges in a web revamp, we at Bester Capital Media will be happy to strategize with you about the ways Growth-Driven Design can augment your business outcomes.

As a HubSpot partner agency, we’re fully equipped with the tools and teams required to build a well-thought digital presence on core Growth Driven Design principles.

To discuss your web design & development project, connect with us today!

 



Originally Published July 10, 2019 02:00 PM, Updated October 31, 2019.



Our Latest Blogs

Our Latest Blogs