An Introduction to
Growth Driven Design
Learn what it takes to launch a website in a fractionof the time of a traditional website design.

An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

Foreword by Trish Lessard
It’s been a few years since I have been as excited as I am today to share withyou a new and (proven) approach to website design.
For the past 18 years, I’ve felt the website redesign process was flawed. So
many companies have outdated websites because a complete redesign isincredibly stressful and time-consuming.
In early 2014, Media Junction embarked on a new approach to website
design. A client, Avella, wanted to get their website up quickly and makeenhancements based on real data about how customers actually use their site.
So that’s exactly what we did.
We launched Avella’s website in only 60 days - a fraction of the time of a
traditional redesign. Over the past year, we’ve worked with their team tocontinually improve their website—and their results have been incredible.
Growth Driven Design is revolutionary. It’s the process we now recommend to
our clients—and how we chose to update our own website.
This ebook is a must read if you’re considering a website redesign. Learn
what’s wrong with the traditional web design process and decide if Growth
Driven Design is right for your company.

Table of Contents
Introduction..............................................................................................................................4
Why Traditional Web Design is Broken..................................................................... 5
The Shift Marketers Need to Make...............................................................................7
The Three Pillars of Growth-Driven Design............................................................8
The Growth-Driven Design Process............................................................................9
Final Thoughts & Next Steps........................................................................................24

An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

Introduction
You are wasting time and resources on your website and don’t even know it.
For six years I ate, slept, and breathed web design. Working both internally andat agencies, I launched hundreds of websites and just over a year ago I realized
everything I thought I knew about the web design process was completely
wrong.
What we have come to accept as the standard way we approach building andmaintaining a website is riddled with systemic risk and is costing your business
time, money and opportunity.
But there is a better way, a new way to approach your website that holds
tremendous potential for you and your business. It’s time to take a step backand challenge the assumptions of the traditional web design process.
My hope in writing this book is to open your eyes to a smarter approach towebsite design so you can avoid website disasters, produce better results,
impress your boss and grow your business.
-Luke Summerfield4

An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

Traditional Web Design is Broken
Your website is your biggest marketing asset and is the centerpiece of all your marketing
activities. The first place people go is the website when looking for more information on
your products or services. All of our marketing efforts and the first place prospects comelooking for information is the website.
Your best salesperson is your website. Did you know a prospect has already moved through70% of the sales process before even reaching out to your sales team? How do you thinkthey find the information before talking to someone? – Your website.
Unfortunately, the way we approach building and improving our websites isfundamentally broken.

The Traditional Website Design Process
I love the look people give me when I ask them about their last website redesign project.
Most tilt their head back, roll their eyes and cringe in disgust, remembering what aheadache it was.

Think back to your last website redesign project you did with your company
and ask yourself:
How would you describe the overall experience?
What went right and wrong in the process?
How much time/energy/resources did it take to finally get live?
Did it get launched on time or on budget?
After the launch, how much continuous improvement has happened to it?
How excited are you to do another website redesign?

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

Traditional Web Design is Broken (cont.)
Chances are you didn’t
enjoy your last website
redesign project.
The approach causes that pounding
headache of website redesign.

Traditional Web Design
Large Up-Front Cost: The average small
to medium-sized business (SMB) website
costs anywhere between $15,000 - $80,000
up-front. The website requires the full
payment before going live.
Large Time & Resource Commitment: Theaverage SMB website takes three months
to complete and requires a great deal ofresources and energy from your team.

Not Set in Stone: Large projects canfluctuate in cost and time, which makes
accurate quotes difficult.
Project delays and increased budgets
happen sometimes.
No Prototype: The Traditional method
launches a website that should succeed intheory. However, this method lacks a “trial
and error” run with viewers.
Trial and error helps determine whatworks for viewers and what does not,which is beneficial in the design process.

After launch, a website has no major updates for 1.5 to 2 years.
Our #1 marketing asset and best salesperson, our website, now sits unchanged for years,
which is not conducive to maximize website performance.
Some small updates or improvements may happen, along with adding blogs or landing
pages to the site, but the vast majority of the site remains untouched.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Shift Marketers Need to Make
How can we approach the website redesign process from adifferent angle?
We need to find a process that produces a quick and agile website, and produces viewer
feedback prior to completion.
What is that process? – Growth-Driven Design.

A Smarter Way to Think About Web Design
Growth-Driven Design changes our approach and way of thinking about building andgrowing the website.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Three Pillars of Growth-Driven Design
01
Minimize risks associated with traditional web design.
We work to avoid the risks of traditional web design by taking a systematic approachto shorten the time to launch, focusing on real impact and continuous learning andimprovement.

02
Continuously learn and improve.
We are constantly researching, testing and learning about our visitors to inform ongoing website improvements. Through continuous improvements we can reach peak
performance.

03
As you learn, inform marketing and sales (and vice versa).
Growth-Driven Design is tightly integrated with marketing & sales. What we learn about
visitors helps inform and improve marketing & sales strategies and tactics (and vice versa).

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process
The Growth-Driven Design process is broken up into two
major phases:
PHASE 1: STRATEGY / WISHLIST / LAUNCH PAD WEBSITE

Strategy
Much like the traditional website design
process, the first stage of Growth-Driven
Design is the strategy stage.

Personas: Next you will develop detailed
persona profiles for the different types ofgroups visiting the site.

In this stage we’ll develop a rock solid
foundation that we can build our GrowthDriven Design process upon using thefollowing steps:

A persona is a fictional representationof your ideal customer. You can create
different groups of personas based oncommon characteristics your audienceshares. This could be a point of pain,
industry, job title, etc.

Goals: What are the performance goals
that we are trying to achieve with our
website? How have we historically
performed, where would we like toimprove and how will this impact theoverall marketing department’s goal?
For help with setting and tracking goals, download
HubSpot’s free S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable,
Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) marketing
goals Excel template.

As you’ll learn later in the book, GrowthDriven Design centers around the user, so
it is critically important to fully researchand develop your persona profiles in the
beginning, as they will set the stage for all
future activities.
To learn how to create personas for yourbusiness, download HubSpot’s free buyer persona
PowerPoint template.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Quantitative Research - Website & Analytics Audit: Time to start digging into the data.
Analyze the current website’s performance and perform a quantitative audit of the good
and the bad.
As you do this, identify where the website can improve.

Through interpreting our quantitative data, we can create a hypothesis around what we can improve, how we
can improve it, and relatively how much impact our improvement can have. We can then test our hypothesis
with an experiment, and use our quantitative data to measure the results.
NISSA THUMANN - MEDIA JUNCTION - DEVELOPER

Qualitative Research - User Research: After proactively reaching out to your existing users
to learn more about them, use the data to better understanding of who they are and findways to improve.
As you’re collecting new user research, validate the assumptions you put in your original
persona profiles. More often than not you can include additional information.

Through qualitative research, we’re able to observe the user’s goals, motivations, and pain points in action.
This helps us to develop an understanding for the human behaviors that are tied to the quantitative
data points that we’ve collected.
As a result, we can begin to empathize and design for the human on the other side of the monitor, thus improving our user experience and moving the needle on key performance indicators like conversion and retention.
R YA N V O N B E R G E N - M E D I A J U N C T I O N - D E S I G N E R

10An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Fundamental Assumptions: Using what you’ve learned in all of the previous steps, you can
now start forming some fundamental assumptions about your users.
Some examples of fundamental assumptions include:
Value propositions for each product, service and offer
The various locations and devices users will be accessing your website from
What information your users are looking for
These fundamental assumptions help you explain the behavior and motivations of yourusers. They influence both the global and page strategy, and also future Growth-Driven
Design cycles.
Global & Page Strategy: The last step in the strategy phase develops both a global strategy for
the website as a whole and a specific page-by-page strategy for each major page on the site.
Both the global and individual page strategies should incorporate all of the previous steps.
Also, they should lay out a detailed strategy of exactly how to best engage and influence
the user to best attain your goals.
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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Your Wishlist
The next stage in the Growth-Driven Design process is to create a wishlist. Taking what
you’ve learned in your strategy planning, gather your team together and brainstorm every
impactful, creative and innovative idea that you’d like to include on the site.
Go into your brainstorming session with a “clean slate” – don’t get hung up on theexisting website. What items do you need on your list to achieve your goals? Answer thisdisregarding the issues of money, time, and development skill.

Include brainstorming ideas 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.
After a few hours of brainstorming, you and the team should have a list of 50-150+ ideas forthe new website. Not all of these items will be implemented right away, but start to think ofas many ideas as possible.
Your wishlist determines both the initial action items to implement on the new site, andthe agile and flexible list that continuously changes. Adding to and subtracting from theagile and flexible list re-prioritizes action items over time.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Launch Pad Website
In the traditional web design process we launch websites at the finish. In Growth-Driven Design
we launch websites right away.
In this stage, we build and launch what we call a “Launch Pad website”. All of your other
Growth-Driven Design activities and improvements start from this Launch Pad website.
Launch the imperfect Launch Pad website quickly. We want to avoid getting stuck on analysis,
features or content while building our launch pad website. No one launches a perfect website
on the first go. However, your launch improves your current website and gives a starting point
on which to continuously improve.
The size and complexity of the Launch Pad website varies depending on what you have on yourwishlist and what type of website you have. Shorten your list to 20% of the original. This shortlist makes an impact and launches quickly so you can continue to learn about your users andimprove the site.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Run an 80/20 Analysis on Your Wishlist
In the wishlist phase we compiled a long list of all the action items we’d ideally want on
the site. Start sorting and prioritizing these wishlist items to determine which action items
happen first. Implement those on the launch pad website.
Review the list with your entire team and identify the 20 percent of items that will produce
80 percent of the impact and value for your website’s users. Once you have identified thosecore 20 percent of items, pull them to the side and do some additional filtering by asking
yourself, “Is this action item…?”
A “must have” or actually a “nice to have”? – If you answer “nice to have” then it will returnback to the main list.
Then with the remaining items ask:
Is this absolutely necessary for the initial Launch Pad site, or could we build it into the site inmonth two or month three?
Narrow your focus. The “Must Have” action items provide the most impact. Narrow down tothese core action items to ensure a quick launch.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Hypothesis Statements for Each Core Action Item
Once we have narrowed down our list of action items for the Launch Pad website down to themost impactful 20%, then create a “hypothesis statement” for each one of the action items.
The hypothesis statement allows us to gain clarity on how each action item relates back to
the goals we’re trying to achieve, the persona we’re focusing on, and the expected impact.
Here’s an example hypothesis statement:
ACTION ITEM 1
Hypothesis Statement
For [MARKETING MARY] visiting the [PRICING PAGE], we believe changing[ENTERPRISE PRICING] into a [REQUEST A QUOTE] will [BOOST MQL CONVERSION BY 10%]We believe this to be true because [RESEARCH OR PREVIOUSLY VALIDATED ASSUMPTION]
Expected Impact + Effort Required + Metrics Measured + Definition of Complete

At the bottom of each statement, there are four important items:
Expected Impact - A single number basedon the value the visitor receives from theaction item and the impact that will have inmoving toward your goals.
Effort Required - A single number that
represents the combination of the numberof hours, resources and difficulty to
implement that particular action item.

Metrics Measured - Specific metrics youneed to measure to test this specific action
item and evaluate if your hypothesis wascorrect. The more specific the metrics arethat you list, the better.
Definition of Complete - All the steps youneed to complete in order to consider thisaction item complete. Defining this up front
helps us avoid any grey areas that may
arise down the road when reviewing results
or efficiency.
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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Web Process Steps

Set Up Data Collection

Once you have identified the most criticalaction items to include on your Launch Pad
site, you can run those items through thestandard website implementation process,including:

The last step of the Launch Pad website
sets up qualitative and quantitative datacollection around:Messaging & Content
User Experience (UX) & Site Architecture
Inbound Marketing Strategy Alignment
Wireframes
Designs
Development
Quality Assurance and TestingYour goals defined in the strategy phase
Each of your fundamental assumptions…AND ach hypothesis statement of yourE
action items implemented in the
Launch Pad website.
Also, set up data collection. It allows you
to start learning about your visitors once
your Launch Pad site is live.

Just launched a new website?
Have you recently launched a website, but want to implement the Growth-Driven Design continuous improvement model? No problem!
You can use your existing website as your launch pad website and move right to phase 2, theon-going cycle of Growth-Driven Design.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
PHASE 2: THE GROWTH-DRIVEN DESIGN CYCLE

Continuous Improvement
Your Launch Pad website is live. Time to start your on-going cycles to continuously
experiment, learn, and improve on your website.
You still have a long wishlist of impactful items that you’d like to implement on the site. Thisagile list should be updated on a regular basis.

This Revolves Around the Persona
This entire cycle starts with and revolves
around the personas who are coming to
your website.
At each stage of the cycle, continuously
ask yourself how this relates andprovides value to the personas visiting
your website.
If at any point it becomes unclear how
an action item provides value to, or
relates to the persona, take a step backand re-evaluate what you’re working on.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Cycle Step 1 : PlanFirst, the Growth-Driven Design cycle needs planning. Identify the most impactful items at
the current moment. Plan to implement the top ones into the current cycle.
A number of steps go into the planning phase:
Performance vs. Goals: Review the current performance of the website and contrast that toyour goals. This informs you of important opportunities.
Additional Data or Research: After the last cycle, review your performance vs. goals. Often
additional data and research may need to happen in order to help clarify what action items
you should add to your wishlist.
Learning from Marketing & Sales: Connect with the marketing and sales teams. Determine
the key items learned about the user since your last cycle.
This information can hold insight that can transfer to your action items implemented in yourGrowth-Driven Design program.
Here’s an Example ...
The marketing team may have written a blog on a particular topic that exploded in popularity andresulted in a great number of organic and social visitors.
We’ve now learned that this topic is important to your personas. How can you take that knowledge
and add new items to your wishlist to influence your Growth-Driven Design program?

Brainstorm and Prioritize Wishlist: Based on all of the new data, research and learnings
gathered at this point, brainstorm again to determine any new action items to add to thewishlist.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Generally speaking, your action items fit within these buckets:
BOOST CONVERSIONIMPROVE UXPERSONALIZE
TO THE USER

BUILD MARKETINGASSETS

Conversion points

Navigation

Navigation

Tools

User path

Ex: Blog Layout

Ex: Blog Layout

Marketing resources

Testing value props

UI improvements

UI improvements

Directories / listings

Split Testing

Mobile experience

Mobile experience

SEO-focused asset

Boost Conversions: The first bucketof wishlist activities directly relate toconversion rate optimization.
Improve User Experience: Improvements
to the website give the user a better
experience and make it easier for them tonavigate. They find what they are looking
for and solve their problem(s).
Personalize to the User: Adapting the site,
calls-to-action, content offers, etc. to thespecific visitor based on the data we know
about them. This includes tailoring basedon interests, persona, device, geolocation,referral source or previous actions on
your site.

Build Marketing Assets: Marketing assets
hold great value for your marketing
program, such as email lists, social
accounts, your blog, etc.
Build new marketing assets into thewebsite such as tools, in-depth resource
sections, online training, directories, etc. -any item that provides great value to boththe end user and your company.
A great example of a marketing asset is
HubSpot’s Marketing Grader. Users get a
detailed report of their digital marketing
efforts and HubSpot gains links, data
and leads.
General Website Updates: General website
updates come up from time to time andcan be added to your wishlist as well.
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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Prioritize Your Wishlist
Once all the new items added to the wishlist, then prioritize all the action items. Base themon their (High / Medium / Low) impact on the goals of the website and value to the user.
Plan sprint cycle: With an updated and prioritized wishlist, pick the most impactful action
items you want to implement in this cycle.
The number of items you pick depends on how long the cycle lasts. Best to pick less items
and really focusing on doing your best work with them. If you happen to complete themearly, you can always go back to your wishlist and pick more.

Cycle Step 2 : Develop
Now to the develop phase of the cycle. Start implementing impactful action items on the site.
Your team gets together to start completing each action item that you selected in theplanning phase.
Experiment with each action item you implemented. See the impact it has on theperformance of the website. To measure your experiments you must setup validation
tracking around the metrics outlined on the action item.
Once launched, consider developing a marketing campaign (social, PPC, blogging, etc.)
specifically designed to drive traffic to that section of the site. Collect the data.
During the develop phase of the cycle, build and schedule the marketing campaign whileworking with your marketing team.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Cycle Step 3 : Learn
After your experiments collected enough data, you can then move to the learn phase. In thelearning phase, you review the information you collected about your website visitors.
Based on the information you collected, validate or disprove your hypothesis on your action
item card. Did your change impact as you expected, why or why not? Based on the results, what
did you learn about your visitor? What did you learn about them that you didn’t know before?
Publish the correct hypothesis and the information learned about users in a place everyonein the organization can access.

“Every website or application has a unique subset of users that share common traits. It is a primary goal of
Growth-Driven experiments to answer questions about our unique subset of users.
Let’s imagine that we have a food blog and want to know how to best engage our readers. Take a look at thefollowing learnings we’ve had through running quantitative experiments:• We learn that our users want comfort food in the winter, but want to lose weight through the rest of the year.
• We learn that our users are more likely to read an entire piece of content if our first paragraph contains lessthan 120 characters and is preceded by a full width image.
• We learn that our users are most engaged with our content at 9 am on weekdays.
These learnings all compound on one another and help us to hone in on who our users are and exactly whatworks best to engage them. With these three key learnings, we will know what to write about seasonally, how toformat our content, and when to send out our newsletter.”
M A T T H E W R H E A U LT - S I D E K I C K , G R O W T H T E A M - L E A D D E V E L O P E R

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Cycle Step 4 : Transfer
The last step in the cycle is to now transfer any impactful information you’ve learned in yourcycle to other parts of your business.
Review previously completed action items to see if you can find any patterns about your users.
Here’s an Example ...
Let’s say that in your experiment you were testing two different landing page variations. One variation
used social proof as the independent variable and the second variation used authority.
After running the experiment, you reviewed the data to find out that for your users coming to yourwebsite, social proof was a much more influential factor leading to conversions.
Now that you’ve learned that social proof is a better trigger for your audience, you can inform yourother teams to start incorporating social proof into other parts of their marketing and sales activities
such as email or sales scripts.

Now host a meeting to educate the team members about your recommendations. Brainstorm
ways to integrate and transfer these ideas into tactical action items within their department.

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

The Growth-Driven Design Process (cont.)
Then, Repeat
The cycle is now complete. Go back to the beginning and start planning your next cycle.
This cycle repeats itself over and over again each time with a better end result and morelearning about your visitors. The more cycles you can complete, the more impact yourwebsite has.

strategylaunch pad
websitePhase One: 1 monthPhase Two: monthly cycle(for 11 months)

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An Introduction to Growth Driven Design

Final Thoughts & Next Steps
The companies who are adopting the Growth-Driven Design methodology are finding huge
success in the flexibility and results they are getting.
Re-evaluate both the way you approach your existing website and how you approach
future redesigns.
Grow as a marketer and start implementing Growth-Driven Design.

Ready to Learn More?
When you sign up for the free “Deep Dive Training Course” at
GrowthDrivenDesign.com you will learn and gain access to:
Detailed step-by-step implementation of the GDD process
GDD Templates and documents
Tools to use
Best practices and ideas
If you’re an agency who’s interested in offering Growth-Driven Design as a website retainer
service, register for our free “Agency GDD Blueprint” training to learn how to market, selland service Growth-Driven Design retainers.

24www.mediajunction.com