Web development and design is no longer a major linear project. Instead, it has evolved into an iterative process focusing on incremental improvement, leading to quicker launch times and an investment that is both spread out over longer times and more closely tied to its return. That process is called growth-driven design (GDD). And it’s seen increased adoption across industries.
Much like agile development, it has led to a change in mindset in which web design is an ongoing tactic that never ends but never goes out of date.
To get there, of course, marketers focusing on growth-driven design need to be able to rely on data that tells them what’s working, and where improvements might be necessary. That’s where digital assistants come into play. Join us for an in-depth exploration of growth-driven design. We’ll explain how digital assistants can help businesses in industries from financial services to education create a better web design process.
The Nuances and Benefits of Growth-Driven Design
At its core, growth-driven design is a simple process. It consists of three basic stages: strategy, launch pad, and continuous improvement.
Strategy
The strategy stage includes using research, such as user testing and quantitative surveys, to learn as much as possible about your audience. Your goal is to discover how your website can solve their needs. For a bank, this might include testing the success of the current website or looking at past satisfaction scores and surveys from interactions with digital and traditional promotional channels.
Launch Pad
The launch pad stage consists of the quick build and launch of a new website that, at minimum, performs better than the current site. Crucially, the goal here is not perfection. Aim for an improvement over the status quo. Every improvement should build on the research and takeaways gained from the strategy stage.
Continuous Improvement
The continuous improvement stage treats the launched website as a starting point. It uses the interactions of real users on the new, live site as an opportunity to learn more about them. In turn, this approach leverages feedback into small and iterative improvements. The continuous improvement stage never ends. Instead, it’s broken down into smaller substages. Learnings lead to improvements, leading to further learnings, etc.
A website built through this type of design process comes with a few significant examples that are worth highlighting:
- Changes can be made quickly. This is especially helpful in industries with changing customer expectations, like financial services. The continuous evolution of the site can keep pace with other digital offerings that have disrupted the banking industry.
- The development process is less risky. Don’t spend huge resources on one big redesign and hope for the best. Instead, base changes on real user feedback, making the new website more likely to succeed.
- Costs are tied closely to ROI. In budget-tight industries like education, justifying the major cost of a redesign can be challenging. A growth-driven design that is tied directly to improved metrics can be an easier sell for budget officers and boards of directors.
Of course, simply switching to growth-driven design mode is not an automatic success guarantor. Above all, the data input sources play a vital role in whether these types of designs succeed or fail. That’s where digital assistants can enter the equation.
How Digital Assistants Help in the Strategy Stage of Growth-Driven Design
The initial stage of GDD depends heavily on data and information gathering. A true understanding of your audience is only possible when moving away from assumptions and towards data-based conclusions. Where that data comes from can make or break the success of your website design.
Have already worked with a digital assistant in the past or on your previous website? Then you know the intelligence collected as part of audience interactions is a vital data source. Comprehensive reporting allows you to draw conclusions about common and important topics for audiences, sentiments related to specific topics, and more.
The strategy stage, of course, is best when conclusions come from multiple types of data sources. Still, the database of an existing digital assistant can enter the mix as an important source for building your website structure and initial content.
How Digital Assistants Can Become Part of the GDD Launch Pad Stage
Digital assistants can also take on a core role as strategy turns to execution. At the launch pad stage, your website needs to launch with at least some improvement over its predecessor. Launching the website with a digital assistant can help to accomplish that.
A live, interactive chat function can accomplish a number of things. Most importantly, it takes away the need for a wide range of non-central pages. Especially complex websites, like those in higher education, tend to be immensely complex, with thousands of pages and subpages. A digital assistant that can answer questions on demand reduces the need for many of these pages.
As a result, the GDD-driven website can launch in a leaner iteration. Instead of having to browse through many pages, users can get quick answers to their questions no matter what page they’re on.
How Digital Assistants Can Inform the Continuous Improvement Stage Within GDD
The final stage is what makes growth-driven design so unique, and it’s also where digital assistants can take on perhaps the largest and most natural role.
As soon as the website launches with a digital assistant, visitors will use it for a more interactive, Q&A-based experience. Every interaction, in turn, becomes a unique insight into how audiences interact with the website and brand, including what types of questions they ask, where they are when they ask those questions, and more.
Through the right reporting structure and analysis, these ongoing insights can become a core driver of improvement iterations of the website. Every incremental change can now be backed by data, and assessed on a continuous basis.
Consider the example of a banking website that just launched in the launch pad stage. If an increasing number of customers ask about the online bill pay feature, it may deserve a better and more intuitive build-out. After that build-out, the website owner can monitor whether the questions related to online bill pay have decreased, or other changes need to be made.
Building a More Sustainable Growth-Driven Design Process with Digital Assistants
Growth-driven design has the potential for immense success, but only when supported by the right data and information structure. The ability of digital assistants to help in every stage of the process can make this philosophy more approachable, and more sustainable in the long term. The result is simple: not just a better website, but one that continues to improve over time and through its iterations. Learn more about building a sustainable GDD process with digital assistants.
