Continuous improvement: making incremental progress on your website

The chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve likely been through at least one, but more than likely multiple website design & development projects. If the latter, this likely meant that every few years you went through a large-scale project which included a full redesign and redevelopment of the website to a new definition of ‘perfect’. The reality is that websites are never perfect and need constant strategic improvements. The traditional method of website design is dead, instead becoming a growth-driven design process. Here we explore the ‘continuous improvement’ phase of your website once it’s live and consider how you can maximise the impact of changes made.  

Your business is constantly changing, and your website needs to reflect that while also ensuring it’s structured to work for its day-to-day users. The continuous improvement cycle of your website development ensures you can stay up to date by consistently monitoring the effectiveness of your website, gathering real user data to understand areas of improvement and making decisions based on your priorities – usually by more leads or more transactions, for example.   

There is no end to continuous improvement. There are always improvements that can be made to your website. This might be via an updated form, restructure of a page, change of imagery or written copy, or addition of new media to improve the page experience. Unlike full redesign projects, continuous website improvement will mean that you have flexibility in keeping your website relevant with meaningful changes, whether updating existing or implementing new features. As your company changes and your customer expectations evolve, you are in a position to be agile and adapt to those needs. No more concerning long-term projects that become a temporary drain on your in-house resource.   

Give your users a better experience  

We’ve all been on the end of poor customer experiences during our lives. We’ve all wanted companies to do better. Your customers will be no different. Growth-driven design is all about continuously collecting data from your users and making informed and educated decisions on how to improve your website for them using that data. This is a much more assured way of creating an experience that your customers can engage with.  

How is continuous improvement structured?  

Like with any process for improvement, the continuous website improvement process requires a consistent cycle to ensure you can plan, build, learn and transfer. 

Plan 

You begin planning based on a review of user data. Here you can run additional user testing if needed for clarity. We use tools for this, such as Google Analytics, HotJar or Mouseflow, to give us insights into both user behaviour and recordings of how users are actually scrolling through the website.

Build 

The building element of the process is the implementation of priority, strategic improvements that will ensure you are developing features and adding content or new website items required to achieve the desired outcome. This brings the whole team back together as it’s important everyone understands the improvements made.

Learn 

This is the best part of the process! Once those deliverables have all been implemented, you start the process of collecting data once again to learn how effective those changes have been. This gives you a chance to analyse the impact and be clear if they’ve had the desired outcome or not

Transfer 

Once you have taken learns on board, you can transfer that knowledge throughout the team, which helps educate any future decisions made on continuous improvements. Here, all information must be shared, regardless of the significance you believe this has upon all other stakeholders.

Repeat 

As raised earlier, the continuous improvement cycle for websites has no real end. No reason to set and forget. There are always improvements to be made, so once you have gone through one cycle above, it’s then about moving through the list of priorities to implement existing lower-priority items or new critical items to make further improvements to performance. 

Quarterly summits are key for prioritisation  

You need a way of implementing changes that are going to make the highest impact based on your user goals and company objectives. Every quarter you will need to host a summit between your stakeholders and developers to ensure that you have time for open conversation about improvements, allowing for challenges to be raised and the team to truly collaborate. This gives insight from all angles.  

It’s also important to have these summits, not just to look ahead, but to review what was achieved across the previous quarter and plan what may be outstanding from then. This means as a collective nothing gets left behind, and you can figure out the best plan moving forward.  

Setting goals for the next quarter is then what drives your priority list. Whether that is reducing bounce rate, increasing conversions, acquiring new subscribers, etc, you will settle on a theme based on your goals. It’s important these meetings are efficient so that you are clear on the plan and break that down into relevant sprint cycles which break down further into smaller tasks over a bi-weekly plan, build, learn and transfer process. 

Making your user experience even better is like a digital version of hospitality! You should fall in love with the process of continuous improvement and realise both the impact it has on your users, but also your team, who aren’t hindered by huge redesign projects. If they enjoy the process, that will soon show in the data when your users are seeing the value of those improvements.