We often get asked about the mysterious discovery phase and what we get up to during this stage. Unless you’ve been lucky to work somewhere that does user-centred design properly, it might be confusing.

Discovery fundamentals

The aim of the discovery phase is to build up a deeper understanding of your target audience and the problem area which you’re trying to solve.

During discovery, we do research to gather data about people’s behaviour and their ‘pain-points’ around particular tasks or life events, whether it’s someone looking to buy something specific online, or someone applying for their first job. Although we may have our own experiences of doing this, we don’t all think alike so our experiences, values and motivations will be different. In psychology terms, there’s a cognitive-bias known as the false-consensus effect which shows that we often assume people will think and behave like us (we’re often wrong). In other words, it’s never a good idea to base design decisions purely on our own assumptions without first getting our hands on some data.

Typical questions we might ask at the start of a discovery project are:

Who are your users and what is their current context of use?
How are they doing things now?
How big is the problem and what are people trying to do to overcome it?
What are their goals?

When we’ve collected enough data on each of these questions from doing interviews and observation, we should start to see patterns in the data which will form the basis of your users’ needs. User needs will inform the next (design) phase of your project.

Understand context

By visiting people in their own environment, examining artefacts and observing them carrying out specific tasks, we can start to learn how people’s circumstances and surroundings can influence their behaviours and we can also learn more about the factors affecting their decision-making processes by talking to them.

We call this kind of research contextual research (or ethnography) and it can be helpful on so many levels. For example, you may observe people using particular workarounds or strategies they’ve developed over time to help them perform certain tasks which would otherwise be more cumbersome. If you’re observing people in the workplace, you might find that certain environmental conditions (e.g. lighting, noise) may be affecting their concentration levels, which is important to take into consideration when approaching any potential design solution.

***Artefact analysis in contextual studies can inform early ideas about how people naturally organise data and the kind of language they use.***

Scoping out your discovery

Asking lots of questions and deciding what you want to learn before you jump into discovery will not only give you a set of hypotheses to work with, but it will also help guide you by dictating what kind of research activities you should be focussing on to unearth answers to your questions.

We usually recommend at least 8 weeks for a decent discovery. This allows enough time for some initial digging (desk research, speaking with subject-matter-experts), deciding who you need to involve and invite to take part in your research, followed by 2-3 rounds of interviews ideally. This timescale may be shorter or longer, depending on how niche or complex the problem you’re looking to solve. If you’re working in unchartered territory or the audience is wide, you’ll need more time. It’s always better to err on the side of caution and give yourself some extra time and flexibility to prepare for any unknowns. Try and think of discovery as going fishing¹ : Head out early and cast your net wide. Look out for surface ripples. By midday, you should have seen enough to work out if you need to re-cast or focus your efforts elsewhere.

Think of discovery as going fishing: Head out early and cast your net wide. Look out for surface ripples. By midday, you should have seen enough to work out if you need to re-cast or focus your efforts elsewhere.

Team engagement is key

It’s tempting for non-researchers to be disengaged during the discovery phase but you’ll get much better results if you make it easy and inclusive for people to get involved from the offset. Take people along to your interviews and take notes or get them to help arrange the sessions. Getting people exposed to regular research will reap rewards and user research should always be a team sport.

It’s crucial that we understand the current state of the problem area before we start designing a solution, so a thorough discovery phase is essential before doing any design work. After all, if we don’t know enough about the people we’re designing for, we risk solving the wrong problems and making things that no-one will use.