Many teams focus solely on product delivery, leaving important aspects aside.
But successful digital products need to start with Product Discovery!
Anything involving UX requires time for discovery. But how does Product Discovery work?
What is Product Discovery?
Product Discovery process focuses on understanding user problems.
The goal is to confirm the ideas and find solutions before starting the project.
By understanding your user closely, you can enhance the Design Thinking process!
This process is vital to determine whether your product is viable or not.
You may have some questions about the scope of Product Discovery
What is the problem that the product is solving? What is the product value proposition?
What are the product's goals and scope and which metrics will guide its success?
The idea is to collect enough evidence to prevent mistakes before the product comes to market.
Discovery is a risk-reducing exercise that guides the design stages to ensure thriving solutions!
How Does Product Discovery Work?
To better understand how to handle UX-focused Product Discovery, you'll need to know a few things.
- Interviews. Get comments from all parties involved! Recollect as many opinions as possible while reviewing strengths and weaknesses.
- Research. Analyze what users want, desire and care about. Leverage UX Research with mood boards of competitors and leaders.
- Personas. UX Personas help better understand your users with a vision adaptable to all key persons.
- Workflows. Diagrams and UX workflows are great for understanding the product's logic for a holistic user experience.
- Mockups. With UX Mockups, you can develop a guiding compass for next design phases.
Where To Start With Product Discovery?
Decision-Making
Many will add their two cents, but having a single spokesperson is vital.
With this organization, you avoid misunderstandings and duplicated actions.
The chosen people should be able to make strategic decisions for the project.
Research Strategy
Teams should gather info from all stakeholders from the beginning.
Yet, it's also key to discuss the product's usefulness and viability with actual final users.
You can start by gathering data with a group of from five to eight users.
This number will depend on the project size, but it will be key for usability testing.
Data Analytics
The intersection of data and UX Design is key to understand trends and metrics!
By carefully selecting your tools, you'll be able to collect all data needed for your design operations.
Product Discovery for UX/UI Designers
UX Designers collaborate with Product teams to transform raw data into tangible actions.
This is an iterative process— you can work around it with Agile sprints.
In most scenarios, there are five key points in the Discovery stage for UX designers.
- Confirmation. Start by identifying assumptions and hypotheses. Vision boards, interview notes and recordings will be key!
- Definition. Build a research synthesis to summarize your gathered data. use journey maps and workflow diagrams.
- Design. Create at least mid-fidelity prototypes to ensure user-centered solutions.
- Development. Translate findings and solutions to cutting-edge products with we--thought stacks.
- Delivery. Add continuous user testing cycles to constantly deliver what users want.
Conclusion
Product Discovery is an essential part of the User Experience process.
Creating viable products is a step-by-step process of getting information and reaching a joint solution.
It's possible to adjust the product discovery framework as the project progresses.
The goal is for the product and UX team to work hand in hand to arrive at a solution!
