Discover
Diverge thinking to explore ideas. Set a hypothesis and gather insights to understand user needs and business requirements
Project brief
The discovery phase is crucial to your project. It ensures alignment on key objectives and expected outcomes. The starting point will be the delivery of a written project brief from the product owner or key project stakeholders.
Following refinement of the project brief, a project plan will be collaborated on and shared with the wider team. This should outline the framework for the project, including all activities and planned timings.
Project kick-off
Expert interviews
The project kick-off starts with a series of stakeholder interviews. The goal of these discussions are to help the team better understand the project objectives, business outcomes and technical constraints. Developing an expertise in the problem space and an understanding of the current situation is key.
Prototype personas
Through expert interviews, we also develop a series of proto-personas. These are examples of the type of user who will use the product. Proto-personas are assumption based personas that represent the best guess of the team about who the end user will be. Whilst based on assumption, these help to create a shared understanding within the team and keep our decisions centred on the people using our products.
Workshops
We follow this with a collaborative workshop(s). Attendees will include representatives from product, design, engineering, commercial, operations and marketing. With the goal to align the wider team on objectives, share assumptions and define testable hypotheses made up of a business outcome, user persona, user outcome and feature.
The workshop output will be a list of agreed upon hypotheses statements. Hypotheses should be prioritised based on greatest business risk and user value. Your hypotheses statements set the basis of your MVP prototype. Your aim is to test, challenge and validate each hypothesis, and each feature's ability to address users needs.
Competitive review
A crucial early step in each project is a complete review of the competitive landscape. This starts by defining a series of direct and indirect competitors to look at.
Consideration of indirect competitors, outside of the product market segment, enables inspiration to be drawn from products that might otherwise be overlooked. The competitive review should be centred on the products ability to enable a user to get a job done, and how well it meets the needs of the user.
A competitive review will usually take the form of a spreadsheet or text document, supported by screenshots of a competitor's UI.
Lightning demonstration
Lightning demos are a rapid and collaborative form of competitive analysis, delivered as short presentations, during a workshop. The idea is taken from the Google Venture Sprint process. Each workshop participant shares examples of competitor products. Key concepts / ideas are captured as sketches and posted on a wall. These act as inspiration to be taken into the following design stages.
Further reading
User research
User research involves gathering insights from real users. It enables the team to develop an understanding of the target user, and challenge / validate hypotheses which have been made. A user-centred approach to design requires an in-depth understanding of user behaviour, needs, pain-points and jobs-to-be-done. All of which help guide design decisions and ensure we understand the problem to solve. The approach we take to user research will vary by project.
Within Lean UX, user research is rapid, iterative and collaborative - embedded into each design sprint. User insights are gathered alongside tested prototypes, and fed straight back into the next design phase. Documentation and research artefacts kept to minimum.
Some projects may require a more in-depth focused research study to be completed up front. This may be the case when delivering a product for a new user type, for which existing knowledge is limited.
Exploration of existing data
In cases where design is centred on improving an existing product or service, it is important to review its current status. This will call for an exploration of analytics data and user behaviour metrics, with the goal to identify a focus for where improvements are required. Typically, this will inform the 'what', but it is important to also explore the 'why'. To do so, it is necessary to gather qualitative data from real users of the product. This can be captured customer feedback or fresh user research. In the latter case, user testing can be completed with users, working through scenarios to uncover insights and guide a design direction.
User interviews
User interviews are the best single research method used in the UX design process. Interviews are a structured discussion between the moderators and participant, ideally completed face-to-face. They provide the opportunity for an in-depth discussion and gathering of rich, insightful qualitative data.
Discussions usually last for around one hour, exploring pre-defined themes and areas of conversation. These are detailed in a discussion guide. The discussion guide is a set of prioritised questions, topics and tasks to run through with the participant. It ensures a focus on research objectives, providing a lose structure, whilst offering scope to be flexible and conversational.
The discussion should start by setting expectations for the interview, followed by a series of introductory questions to get the conversation started and put the participant at ease. Questions then become centred around research objectives, exploring jobs-to-be-done, pain points, goals, needs, behaviours and their experience with 'hiring' similar products.
Questioning technique is critical to a user interview. Ask open-ended questions and avoid leading questions. Focus on listening and exploring participant responses further, asking 'why' until the root cause of an issue has been surfaced.
Ethnographic research
User research can also include ethnography - observing the behaviour of users in their natural habitat. For example, a Marketing Manager completing their daily tasks at their own desk. By observing users in a more natural way, it can reveal more accurate results. This research can be completed in person by observing and recording a user, or via a diary study, whereby the user records their own thoughts during a defined period of time.