UX Discovery: Build strong and successful products with a clear vision

What is UX Discovery

UX discovery is the process of understanding user goals, motivations, and challenges through thorough research, and aligning them with business goals.

Imagine, you want to build a digital product and are absolutely certain that the features if offers would tremendously help the user to achieve a specific goal. With some idea about how you want the user interface to look, you sketch out a few roughs and send it off to the UI designer.

The UI designer designs the interface. It looks snazzy and you love it, your development team loves it, and you all jump right into developing the product. You develop screen after screen, taking inspiration from other apps and taking the help of the UI designer whenever needed, and finally your product is ready to launch.

You release the product and much to your dismay the users leave as easily as they come. Did you build the wrong product? What do the users want? Well, you were certain they needed the product? Should you redesign the product? Maybe!

UX discovery is that critical phase of your product development journey that can't be skipped at any cost. It lays the foundation for the development cycle of the product and is extremely crucial for its success.

When is UX Discovery conducted?

So is UX discovery conducted just at the beginning of the product development project or can it be conducted at later stage as well?

Typically, UX Discovery is done at the beginning of the project to set the stage for fruitful product development. On the other hand it can also be done when you introduce new features or want to review your UX at any stage of the product development cycle.

Why UX Discovery?

Before we explore ways to conduct UX Discovery, let's first see why we need to do it. Who benefits from it, and in what way.

UX Discovery sets the direction for the design and development team, and validates the product development plan. Outlined below are some of the advantageous.

It helps us understand users

It helps you see things from your potential users' perspective. It helps you understand their needs, preferences, and pain points, in the context in which they'd use your product. Without understanding your users deeply, you'd end up creating a product that does not resonate with them. Worse, it may not solve the problem as you intended it would.

Align it with business goals

By defining project goals and objectives, you make sure the product design aligns with your business goal. You want to create a product that serves users and also contributes to business success.

Minimizes risk

By conducting UX Discovery you ensure your project is planned well. You identify and steer clear of potential pitfalls, or look for ways to deal with them early on in the project, much before you get, set, and go with the development. This saves you hours of wasted development time and money.

Sets scope and constraints

It's better to manage expectations of stakeholders before hand, to avoid disappointments later. By clearly defining what's in and out of project scope helps prevent creep while ensuring everyone is on the same page, at all times.

Helps in informed decision making

UX Discovery is all about gaining user insights. These findings or insights work as a guide for future decision making. From crafting user stories to building user journeys, from specific feature functionality to the overall layout and experience, everything is based on the learning we do in this phase.

Improves collaboration

Collaborative team discussions and stakeholder interviews bring different perspectives and ideas to the table. This helps us design and plan our product better. It also fosters a collaborative mindset that sets the stage for agile development.

It saves time and resources

Investing time at the beginning of the project saves time and resources at a later stage in the development. Technically, it's always easy to change things in the beginning and very expensive as the project progresses.

Enhances user satisfaction

UX Discovery is mainly about the user. A well executed UX Discovery contributes to the product success hugely by delivering value to customers. You will not only meet your customers expectations but exceed them, if you do it right.

In a nutshell UX Discovery is the compass or the guiding light ensuring you sail in the right direction from the very beginning.

The UX Discovery phase

What does the discovery phase entail?

User Research is a crucial part of the discovery phase. The primary objective is to understand user needs, behavior, and preferences in the right context. Since the goal is to create value for the user, it's best not to guess and reach out to users through interviews, surveys, usability tests.

Here's a simplified process that can help you.

Define objectives

Before you conduct your research, it's best to follow a process. Clearly outline your goals and objectives for the research. What are you trying to learn, identify or validate through your research? What are the pain points you want to inquire about, what user behavior or activity is of importance to you or the product?

Identify your users

Define your potential users for the product. Write down their demographics, psychographics, and any information that is relevant and important to gain a better understanding. Also consider logistical questions, like where to find them and how and when would you conduct the interviews and surveys.

Choose the research method

Your objectives will help you define the method for your research. It could be through personal interviews, surveys, or usability tests.

Conducting interviews

Organize interviews and engage with users to directly learn about their challenges, motivations, and experiences. Ensure your questions are open ended to uncover meaningful insights. Guide the conversation carefully to learn extensively about the user, as user interviews offer a wealth of valuable qualitative data.

Surveys

Surveys are suitable to gather quantitative data from a larger sample. Ensure your questions are clear and concise, and focus on obtaining the specific information you need. Keep the survey as short as possible with only the important questions to curtail abandonment. There are several online tools that can help you conduct a survey effectively.

Usability testing

Observing users while they interact with the prototypes or existing products helps in identifying usability issues. It's eye opening to observe how users interact with the system.

Create user personas

Create user personas based on your findings through research and surveys. Develop personas to represent different user types and make sure you understand each persona clearly. These personas will guide you through the design process.

Create affinity diagrams

Use affinity diagrams to organize your research findings and identify patterns and relationships in the information you've gathered. Group your findings and organize them logically to help you make design decisions.

Who's involved in the process

Mainly the UX Discovery is headed by the UX team, But it's vital to involve the product development team — product owners, software architects, developers and even operations staff — to discuss the findings of the research. This practice ensures you're all on the same page during the development process. Moreover, it's everyone's responsibility to deliver what the users really want.

Conclusion

User Experience Discovery helps businesses by saving development time and effort, reduces risk, and also helps you discover earning opportunities. Though being the most important, it's still the most underrated phases in the product development process.

At Agile Soft Systems we conduct a 360° Design Thinking workshop to uncover insights that help us build customer centric software for product success. Our team of UX experts understand and emphasize on the importance of user research and usability testing to have a clear vision of the product before beginning with development.

Reach out to us to and book a 360° design thinking workshop today.