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Growth Driven Design: Why a wish list is critical for website design

Are you a business owner with a website that needs redesigning? You might have seen a competitor's site that had all the latest features, a modern look and thought - 'I want that!' If you can relate, you're in the right place. So far we’ve introduced Growth Driven Design, explained why the traditional website design process is flawed, discussed the three foundational pillars of GDD and what the GDD Phase 1 strategy planning session should look like. 

Once you come to the conclusion that your website needs a revamp it's time to think - if money was no object - what amazing elements would you include? Now it's time to write your wish list! In this week's blog, we cover the steps to developing a wish list and why this is critical in the website design process.

GDD_WishList_WebsiteDesign.jpg

Coming to your wish list planning session with a ‘clean slate’ approach is key – forget about issues with the current site and think about what you would want the new website to feature, regardless of time or money constraints.

We like to say, "Be careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it!" If you don’t throw the idea out there, it will never have a chance of happening.

Download our free ebook 'An introduction to Growth Driven Design' 

Thought Triggers – You should cover elements such as:

  • Key impactful website sections and pages
  • Marketing assets, tools and resources
  • Specific features, modules and functionality
  • Design elements
  • Changes in experience based on devices, country, etc.

Ideally your brainstorming session will drum up around 50-150+ ideas, so make sure you save your list somewhere you can easily find it again throughout the website build and beyond.

This list will then be used to determine the initial action items of the build – but not all 150+ will make it onto the launch pad site, so you need to prioritise them, and this is how.

80/20 Analysis of your wish list

To run this analysis, gather your entire team and try to identify the 20% of items that will produce 80% of the impact for your website’s users. Once you have identified the core 20%, pull them to the side and do some additional filtering by asking yourself the following two questions:

  • “Is this item a ‘must have’ or a ‘nice to have’?” If the answer is ‘nice to have’ then you should return it to the main wish list.
  • “Is this absolutely necessary for the initial launch pad site, or could we build it into the site in month two or three post launch?” If you agree with the second half of that statement, return this item back to the main wish list.

The aim of this filtering process is to really narrow your focus and reduce your to-do list down to the main core action items to ensure a quick launch.

Remember the main concept with Growth Driven Design is to develop a quick, agile launch pad site producing better results and ROI.

Hypothesis Statements 

Once you have narrowed down your wish list to your core 20% ‘must have’ action items, you need to create a hypothesis statement for each one.

These statements allow you to clarify how each item relates back to your original goals for the new site, the persona/s you are targeting and gives you the opportunity to evaluate the expected impact each action item will have.

Expected Impact + Effort Required + Metrics Measured + Definition of Complete = Hypothesis Statement

Web process steps

Once you have identified the important action items you need to run those items through the standard website implementation process:

  • Messaging and content
  • User experience (UX) and site architecture
  • Inbound marketing strategy alignment
  • Wireframes
  • Designs
  • Development
  • Quality assurance and testing

Set-up data collection

The last step of this stage is to set up qualitative and quantitative data collection around:

  • Goals from strategy phases
  • Assumptions
  • Each hypothesis statement

Setting up data collection is the vital step that allows you to start learning about your visitors once your launch pad site is live.

Have you recently launched a website but still want to implement the Growth Driven Design model? No problem! You can use your existing website as your launch pad site and move right to Phase 2 - the ongoing cycle of GDD (which we will be going over in next week's blog). If you're busting to learn more, then I invite you to download our complimentary ebook ‘An introduction to Growth Driven Design’. 

Download the ebook now by clicking on the button below:

Growth driven design g2m solutions inbound marketing agency sydney web design sydney

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Topics: website design