How to Optimize Your Website With Data-Driven Design

If you want your website to be successful and thrive, you must have a strategy. You can’t just build a website and hope that your product or service will be enough to keep your business afloat. In some cases, the design of your website can mean the difference between your company stagnating or growing. There are numerous design standards that a successful website should follow. However, today we will talk about how to optimize your website with data-driven design.

What Exactly Is Data-Driven Design?

Data-driven design is a design process influenced by information and data that you gather from the visitors of your site. This form of design uses both quantitative and qualitative data. Professional web designers often use this information to make informed judgments on how to design for a particular set of people. Additionally, you can also use the data you collect for the day-to-day administration of digital products. This data is critical if you want to know what is going on with your website. It can even help you make judgments on how to create your new product in the future. Some of the ways to you can gather valuable data for data-driven design are:

• Google Analytics: a comprehensive site analytics package
• Split testing tools
• Digital and in-person user surveys

Ensure Data Access

Once you gather the data, you need to make it available to as many people working on your site as possible. For this data-driven design approach to succeed, critical individuals must first access the data. Larger firms often have restricted information flow across divisions, which may impede establishing this new procedure. It’s a long-held belief that analytics professionals deal with quantitative data while UX researchers and designers focus on the experience. However, this is less and less the case as time goes by.

In addition to this, designers need access to quantitative data, particularly data that describes user behavior. Naturally, for this to be successful, your analytics team will need to make the information as easily consumable and comprehensible as possible. This will allow the UX team to use the information. For this reason, you need to encourage these two different parts of your website to communicate with one another. Think about who needs to know what, how the process will be structured, and what tools you will need to accomplish what needs to be done. Make it easy for everyone to find the information they require by ensuring that it is organized in a clear and straightforward way.

Find The Right Customer With  Data-Driven Design

You can use the information you’ve gathered to learn more about your customers’ preferences. You should gather as much information as possible from the demographic data you find. With this information, you can see if you are reaching your target audience. If you’re not, it is time to make some modifications to your website. Customer surveys and interviews may help you learn more about how and why people use your product. Furthermore, this data can help you set up a SMART goal for your website. This way, you will have a more concrete understanding of your business trajectory and a better understanding of potential setbacks and elements you need to work on further.

Look For Data Irregularities

The following way to optimize your website with data-driven design is by being able to spot any irregularities in the data. You can do this by evaluating quantitative data from web analytics. Customers’ peculiar habits might emerge as some measure that is extremely high or low. There might be an extremely high bounce rate, a very short average stay time, or a higher than usual departure percentage on specific subpages. Of course, to eliminate any other potential reason for these discrepancies, you must make sure all of the technical elements of your website are sound. Therefore, before you start changing anything design-wise, you should check your website’s loading speed, among other things. This is a vital step if you want to eliminate irregularities in the data.

For example, if you notice that all of your pages have roughly the same viewing time, but some have a significantly higher bounce rate, even though there isn’t much difference in design or content, it could be a problem with loading times. People generally do not want to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. If that is not the case, you can look at other causes for the bounce rate. This can be anything from a cluttered UI to an unappealing color palette. However, whatever the case may be, data will provide an answer.

Give Data-Driven Design Time

It is not enough to collect data and understand how to evaluate it. Patience is essential if you want to know how to optimize your website with data-driven design. As a result, implementing a fully functional data-driven design may be particularly challenging in this area. After analyzing your data and making any adjustments, you must wait and see what happens. That’s when the next obstacle comes into play. As soon as they see something, people tend to try to categorize and analyze it. However, in this case, that inclination is counter-productive. It’s essential to monitor the impact of your design changes on your customers over time. However, keep in mind that there will always be a period of adjustment ahead of you. Changing the design of a website or app requires consumers to retrain themselves on how to use it and adapt.