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During my first week of studying UX design, I focused on the discovery phase. The discovery phase is all about finding out what your goals are, who your audience is and what your strengths and weaknesses are. It’s all that business stuff that everyone is told to do, but few actually do it correctly.

Setting Goals

I wrote in a previous blog post my feelings about the importance of having a solid purpose when working on a project. This attitude is reflected in UX design. One of the first things that should be done in the Discovery phase is stakeholder interviews. Stakeholders are anyone with a vested interest in the success of the project (boagworld.com). In a business this would include department heads, executive staff and employees. The stakeholder interviews help designers come up with a solid goal for the project.

A solid goal is at SMART goal. A SMART goal is:

• Specific (and strategic): Linked to overall mission. Answers the questions of who and what.
• Measurable: How do you know you’ve achieved your goal?
• Attainable: Realistic and achievable within the time frame.
• Relevant: Aligned with current tasks and projects and focused in one area.
• Time-framed: Have a clearly defined time-frame or deadline.

Download a SMART Goal template

Knowing Your Audience

Your stakeholders are people who care about the success of the project. Your audience are the users of your project. They are as important, if not more so, than your stakeholders. In UX design, personas are the most common tool to find out about your users. Personas are fictional characters based on real data. They describe what a user needs as well as their limitations. (ux-lady.com)

Finding Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths and weaknesses are often found using a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis helps an organization find their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. When looking for these from a UX design point of view it is important to look at it from the user’s point of view. Remember UX stands for user experience. They are the reason for the process. UX designers use experience maps (also called journey maps) along with personas to find these things from a user’s perspective and present the information in a much easier to understand format than the 4 squares of a SWOT analysis. (ux-lady.com)

So there we have the basics of the Discovery phase of UX design. I would say the discovery phase is the hardest and most important phase of design because everything else is built off if this phase. By knowing your goals, your audience and your current state of affairs you can start a successful project.

Next week, the Strategy Phase.