What is Discovery?
The purpose of the Discovery process is to help the SAGE team get a deep understanding of the problems they are setting out to address by understanding:
what users are really trying to do when they interact with the business
the current experience for users during the process
what the users’ needs are as they interact with the application.
SAGE examine all the channels and touch-points of the process (not just digital); the end-to-end experience and key user groups. This includes end users, customers, staff, partners, vendors and managers, even if you are only planning to focus on a small part of that experience. SAGE achieve this by doing contextual user research that involves the entire team and all stakeholders.
The Discovery stage will help the team to challenge their assumptions and preconceived ideas of what the problem and solution might be and to frame their understanding of problem and solution around the users’ experience.
The key outputs from this stage are:
a map of the actual users’ experience of the service
user needs for the service (stated, unstated and created).
In the Discovery stage SAGE will clarify the business intent for the application so that we are able to align this with user needs. Sublime need to understand the business processes associated with the service by business process mapping.
If there are any obvious technical, legislative or other constraints relating to the application these will also need be understood in the Discovery stage. This stage is for discovering not validating, so the team does not start prototyping and testing application design.