Boosting your bottom line with iterative design

You’ve launched a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles. You’re certain your users will love the new functionality and you’re waiting to see what results it will drive. But amidst the excitement, it’s important to keep in touch with the reality of its performance.

It’s easy to overlook the need to continue developing your eCommerce store. But over time, even the grandest of sites will begin to show the telltale signs of ageing. Plus, leaving your site to gather dust will leave you out of touch with your customers and falling behind, fast.

The days of website redesign and rebuilds every couple of years are over. The digital world is a fast paced one which is why you need to constantly update and improve your website to keep up with changing customer expectations.

In this blog, you’ll find out…

• Why should you invest in iterative design?
• What processes and tactics can be used to inform your website improvements
• How a retainer package can support an iterative approach

Why should you invest in iterative design?

Iterative design is the process of making gradual but continuous improvements to your eCommerce store. But what’s the value of doing this? You may think it sounds like an unnecessary additional cost, but, it can save you significant money in the long run.

Here are just a few ways that iterative design can positively impact your store’s performance:

• Increase sales
• Generate new revenue opportunities
• Improve conversion rate
• Increase customer retention
• Increase average order value
• Reduce cart abandonment
• Spread the cost of your project
• Provide insight through a test and learn approach

Informing your website improvements

Your goals

What do you want to get out of your store? How does this fit in with your business plans? Your interests? Your vision for your brand? We consider factors like these and glean insight to feed into your project roadmap, ensuring your website improvements are always underpinned by your goals.

Your website’s health

You want to get the most value from your website – long after launch. Over time, it’s expected that your site could need a health check to prevent your once shiny, new store from becoming slow, costly and unsecure.

The insights from a website health check can be fed into your iterative design improvements, ensuring it’s always as enjoyable as possible for your customers to shop with you. When conducting a site health check, these areas help to keep your site secure, save you money and ensure top performance:

• Site and code audit
• Front-end code audit
• Site performance
• Site responsiveness
• Google Analytics audit
• Content audit
• User experience audit

This health check will form a list of priority changes to ensure your site continues to perform for you and your customers. Working through these as part of your retainer plan, you can rest easy knowing your site is always the best it can be.

Code audit

A code audit is a critical part of informing your website improvements, uncovering key areas that need to be worked on. Allowing you to understand the current state of your website, our audit enables us to be fully aware of any issues and opportunities.

With this insight, we can aid you in planning what future development and changes may be needed on site. The code audit covers:

• Quality of overall codebase
• Quality of each extension
• Core hacks
• Use of bad practice
• Code based performance optimisation recommendations
• Historic issues
• Issues outlined within the codebase
• Security issues and recommendations

Reporting and analysis

Are you suffering from a traffic decline? Maybe you’re struggling to convert customers on mobile? Or possibly you want to increase your average order value?

With the right data, it’s possible to understand why these things are happening and what can be done to make performance better. Understanding your customers and their needs, we analyse how they use your website to maximise conversions. Through reporting and analysis, we can pull recommendations specifically tailored to your business needs and budget.

User experience audit

The user experience can make or break a website. That’s why we place high importance on a user experience audit to help you understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Combining data with testing, this audit identifies what’s damaging the user journey, allowing you to improve the user experience through a series of suggested improvements. A UX audit can also answer some important questions too including:

• Where and why are users abandoning their cart?
• What stage do users most commonly leave your website?
• Where are users getting stuck on your website?
• What are users struggling to understand on your website?

Heatmaps and session recordings

Heatmaps and session recordings are great ways of finding out which areas of your site users engage with most and where conversion barriers are:

• Heatmaps: Heatmaps make it easy to visualise and understand complex data. It’s a graphical representation of data where values are depicted by colour on a scale of red (the most popular areas) to blue (the most unpopular areas).
• Session recordings: These sessions highlight what users click, how long they spend on a page, where their pain points are and where they exit the website.

By aggregating user behaviour data, these tactics help you understand exactly how users are interacting with your website allowing us to analyse user behaviour to inform A/B testing.

User testing

User testing enables you to analyse your website with first-hand insight from the people who matter most – your customers. By enlisting user testers to complete a series of tasks, your website’s pain points can be identified.

Through this process, you can explore your audience’s behaviour when interacting with your eCommerce store. Pulling out the insight, recommendations can then be made to support your strategy.

A/B testing

Not all people shop in the same way. As audiences behave differently, it’s important to undertake A/B testing. Throughout this process, one-page design, emails or apps are compared against one another so optimisations can be made based on the best performer.

Data and user research can be combined with best practices to ensure your design improvements are always completed with your users in mind.

Supporting iterative improvements

You can keep your store looking and performing at its best by making iterative improvements throughout the year. The best way to manage this is through a website retainer package.

A website retainer is designed to cover everything you need to keep your website running smoothly, ensuring it evolves with both your business and customer needs. An important part of your website’s ongoing success, retainers ensure:

• Continuous evolvement: We don’t believe in a launch and leave approach. Retainers can be used to continue evolving your store to ensure maximum performance and up to date functionality.
• User experience improvements: Retainers allow you to implement learnings direct from your users. This insight can drive future developments which can be carried out using your retainer roadmap.
• A steady stream of work: If you know there is upcoming plans within the wider business or phased project work, a retainer will be a more efficient approach.

If you want to take an iterative approach to your website, we can help. You should always be confident that your website is in safe hands – even past launch. We’re dedicated to assisting you through a retainer package designed to suit your needs. You can rely on us to provide continuous and committed support for the long term.

Our iterative approach has been beneficial for the likes of Casio and Sue Ryder. No matter the continuous improvements your site requires, you can tap into our knowledge. Get in touch with our team to chat more.