Continuous improvement is the final and most crucial stage of growth-driven design. You don’t want your website to get stuck in the aughts. The web is ever-growing and changing, and a continuous improvement plan will help your organization stay effective and technologically up-to-date.
What is Growth-Driven Design?
Growth-driven design (GDD) is a web design system that speeds up launch time and simplifies continuous improvement of your website as the needs of your community shift. It uses data to improve marketing and impact strategies. Growth-driven design occurs in three stages — strategy, launch, and continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement starts after your website launches. Once users begin interacting with the site, data will show what interests them and what doesn’t. You can focus the development of your site on areas that will have the most impact on and provide value to your community.
Using Quarterly Themes
Continuous improvement lets you set quarterly goals to help you reach your organization’s goals. Choose from these three themes to find a specific quarterly focus metric.
1. Establish
The established theme typically comes into practice after launching a website or making major changes to an already existing platform. You might need to complete items that didn’t make it into the initial launch or find a way to get people involved with your site and see how they respond to it.
Consider:
- Harvest. Go for the “low-hanging fruit.” Build high-impact items that are quick or easy to accomplish right after launch. Decide on wishlist items that didn’t make the cut with your initial launch. Address any technical issues users are experiencing. If you are new to the growth-driven design process, improve any internal challenges you face.
- Audience. Create a flow of visitors to pull feedback and data from. Increase the number of unique visitors to your site each month. Invest in SEO on your page. Build pillar pages and topic clusters covering a particular topic in detail, so users don’t have to go anywhere else for information once they enter your site. Implement paid advertising.
- Value. Ask users how you can add value to their experience and implement those changes. Inquire if users who had a positive experience would be willing to write a review or testimonial on your site. Use a live chat to help users find solutions and to help you learn where people invested in your site might be struggling.
2. Optimize
The optimized theme is all about your visitors. Lean into the data you gathered based on user experience and user value. Your website needs to teeter between improving your visitor experience and achieving your organization’s goals.
Consider:
- Usability. Make your website more intuitive and easier to navigate. How quickly are visitors finding what they need? Cut out any steps that are unnecessary to get them there.
- Conversion Rate Optimization. Once you’ve created the ideal path through your website, you want users to follow it. Increase conversions by reducing points of friction.
- Personalization. Using data you’ve gathered, create an individualized experience relevant to users new and returning.
3. Expand
The expanded theme is about finding creative ways to increase the impact of your website. It may be through releasing new products or setting department goals within your organization.
Consider:
- Products. Launch online training, forums, listings, or other digital products valuable to your community.
- Journey. Find new and more creative ways to improve your community’s journey with your organization. If they are new to your website or you added a new section, you want their experience to be as hassle-free as possible.
- Teams. Use your website to support internal goals. The various data you can gather through your site could be useful to sales, development, or any number of departments in your organization.
Using Sprint Cycles
Creating new digital concepts is a big project. Sprint cycles break the process down into key steps.
4 steps in a sprint cycle:
- Planning. Choose the focus metric, brainstorm how you can improve, and prioritize high-impact ideas from your wishlist. Wishlist items will fall into boosting conversions, UX improvements, personalization to the user, or building market assets.
- Building. Build the action items you brainstormed and prioritized.
- Learning. Review and analyze the data about your users. Learning what worked and what didn’t will help you in the planning phase of your next sprint cycle.
- Transferring. Share what you learned with other parts of your organization. Cross-department collaboration will improve growth efficiency. You can include other departments affected in the planning stage as you begin the next sprint cycle.
Why Continuous Improvement is Critical
Consistently improving your website is crucial to staying relevant to your community. It will be much easier and more efficient to improve as you go, rather than face a total redesign every five to 10 years.
Growth-driven design allows you to spend less time and money on updating and more on your organization’s mission.
Continuous improvement gives you data-based insight into user interest and browsing behavior. These discoveries will help highlight what you need to change to provide value to your community continually.
How CauseLabs Can Help
There is no real end to the continuous improvement phase of growth-driven design. There is always something that can be improved about your website. Zeroing in on your community’s needs will focus on the improvement process. Be intentional about changes to effectively communicate with, provide value to, and support your community.
CauseLabs team members are certified in Growth-Driven Design. Contact CauseLabs to help create a growth-driven design that allows for continuous improvements of your website to help it grow and change with your community.
