Discovery
Discovering, exploring and understanding the problems that customers have is a journey into the unknown.
The process of discovery involves careful scoping, gathering evidence using research, synthesising the evidence and visualisation of the findings.
As well as your users, internal colleagues and systems often come into the mix when exploring issues.
Stakeholder Discovery
When faced with a range of internal stakeholders with differing needs and requirements, Stakeholder Discovery Workshops are a great way to obtain consensus about the most salient issues.
When stakeholders come together, each and every person – from brand director to UX designer – becomes a champion for acting upon the study recommendations.
I can facilitate these sessions, providing impartial interviewing and moderation, and visualisation of outputs.
Quantitative Exploration
I use quantitative research to carefully identify and characterise users, whilst measuring user behaviour for products and services used.
I run surveys on a wide range of topics, but for discovery I’ll typically focus on:
- Exploring the sentiment of customers and non-customers
- Capturing usage and behaviour of products and services
- Identifying the size and implication of pain points
Jobs to be Done
Discovery research is very effective when the user’s specific tasks are explored. JTBD uses specialist techniques to identify unmet needs people have when carrying out tasks that utilise products or services.
When performed correctly, JTBD will identify a wide range of unmet needs in situations where people are highly dissatisfied, indicating promising innovation opportunities.
The benefits of JTBD are primarily:
-
A deep understanding of the user’s specific pain points when performing tasks
-
Prioritisation of unfulfilled user needs, providing a roadmap for innovation
- Innovation for all types of services and products, in mature
I have a good degree of expertise within JTBD. You can read more about JTBD in my thinking section.
Depth Interviews
Depth interviews are a classic qualitative technique for eliciting attitudinal and behavioural detail. I run them 1-2-1, or in pairs or triads.
It can be worthwhile conducting depth interviews to generate a deeper understanding of the user’s values, attitudes and behaviour:
- Exploring service and product user experiences
- Understanding attitudes towards brands
- Discovering the effect of digital communications
- Identifying experiences that delight and disappoint
Ethnography and participant observation
Observing people in their real-life environment, or watching them as they perform a task, is a useful way to help understand the way they interact with your products and services.
Tasking people to record their interactions with brands and communications is a simple and unobtrusive way to gather data.
My ethnographic reports include photos and videos and will form a useful and insightful way to understand users behaviour.