The Discovery phase is a wonderful part of any project, and when budgets allow for one we – and our clients! – find it invaluable.
This is because Discovery the process of overcoming assumptions and better understanding those whom we are trying to serve, so that we might better build a product that delivers true value.
Listening Tours
One of our favoured approaches at Outlandish are ‘Listening Tours’: informal, one-to-one interviews – which we invite you to observe – with a selection of stakeholders and users.
Typically we recommend breaking these two categories down further into subgroups, and interviewing a small number of individuals from each. This is because we recognise that each has unique needs.
For example, when redesigning a website for a stroke charity, it would be wise to interview both stroke survivors and their partners/carers, and treating them as 2 distinct user groups with very different needs of the same product.
- For users we’re trying to identify opportunities for your product to help overcome their problems.
- With stakeholders, we’re trying to better understand the internal needs of your organisation, how the product might interface with your teams’ own work, and whether similar initiatives to the same end – be they tech or otherwise – have been tried and failed before.
If you have an existing product, we might also undertake usability testing.
Synthesis and decision making
Finally, after interviews or testing, we synthesise the findings to discover common trends. This is used for specifying project features, deciding the priorities of what to build, when, and to plot key user journeys.
In short, Discovery work reduces the risk of building the wrong thing, and it truly gets your project moving.
