Discovery and planning

This is the first stage of the UX process where we first touch on/discuss the idea behind our product. It's always a good approach to involve the client here immediately and introduce them to our UX team. Then, together, we can start defining the product scope.

We will start by listening to the client's idea, putting their idea on paper, and trying to understand their idea acutely. In order to understand their idea acutely, we will need to get answers to questions, such as what they want to achieve with this product, their goal, and their targeted audience. This will help the UX team and the client to start giving shape to the product together.

The goal of this stage is that our team should have a clear idea about the product that they will design and develop.

The discovery phase can take up to a few weeks for our team to clearly understand the client idea, their business, their product idea, the problem that they want to solve, and what is important to their users. The UX team's goal here is to be perfectly aligned with the client and have an absolutely clear idea of what the client wants to achieve with this product or service.

During the discovery phase, we, as a UX team, get involved in the client's world. We meet with our client, have conversations with them, and try to understand why and how they came up with this idea. Then, we will try to learn whether they have any specific competitor or other competitors with similar ideas and listen to their stories about why they are involved in this category of business; we do research to better understand our client and their needs. However, more importantly, we need to clearly understand their company's vision and their vision for the product that they want to build.

Understanding the market is also a key part of the discovery phase. One effective way of getting an overview of where your market stands is through surveys. By getting the survey results, we can understand other parts of the market, such as how big our target market is, identify market segments, and define the demographic details of the market and other different market segments. Another good part of having surveys is that we can learn more about our users and their behavior before initiating the designing of the product.

After we finish the process of getting clear goals from the client for their product, we start creating a document with requirements and specifications for starting the product design and development. Now, by having a document in our hand,  that lists the clear requirements and specifications for the product, we will have a better idea of timelines, team sizes, budget, basic product sketches, and wireframes. This will go under the planning stage, which, as a UX team, we will be involved in creating in this first stage of the UX process.

So, now we move on to the planning phase of the UX process.