I’ve been in the marketing industry for a decade now. Lately, I have been hearing a lot of chatter about Growth Driven Design [GDD]. Despite the chatter there are still a lot of you out there that are wondering WTF is growth driven design anyway?

What Is Growth Driven Design?

If I would have known then, what I know now, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second when I was asked to write this blog. GDD evolves around always learning and improving; making small changes, based on data and user feedback, to a website whenever the need arises. For those of you like me who read that the first time and realized that by the end your eyes had rolled to the back of your head, let me put it another way:

“You can no longer rely on your website to be just a business card. Today, you must design with the intention of increasing client and prospect engagement, through an incremental website-design approach.”

Still wondering what in the actual hell GDD is? I go more in depth on the Pinckney Marketing Blog. 

What Does That Look Like?

What would a strategy that incorporated GDD look like? Instead of your website being designed once and then forgotten for years, growth driven web design allows you to start quickly and cautiously and base every design decision on buyer observations.  It allows you to improve over time to get you more and better leads. It is less risky and drives better results than traditional web design.

A GDD strategy would examine your website often and continually. It recognizes that your website is as pliable as Play-Doh and has to be reshaped as your understanding of your users develops. To ensure that you design with intention, research and compile the backend data. This will support your assumptions about your website’s user’s movements and help you to reshape your Play-Doh.

The New Role Of Your Website

There are several key differences between GDD and traditional site redesigns that will assist you in understanding the new role of your website. The biggest differences are the focus on minimizing risk and focusing on results.

In traditional web design, you or your website creator would look over and make the necessary changes once every two to five years! There would be larger upfront costs on your behalf, it would require lots of time and resources and they often are completed late or over budget. The changes that are made tend to be based on assumptions that cannot be backed by data and often become obsolete within months.

GDD, on the other hand, makes changes incrementally over time. This results in lower upfront costs, allows you to launch quickly with the ability to make improvements over time and is often agile, and on budget. The changes that are made ARE backed up by data and because changes are made slowly over time, your website remains up-to-date and only continues to improve!

As show by GDD, UX design is necessary for your website design strategy.