Completing Discovery Milestone

This page covers how teams can complete the Continuous Discovery milestone.

Learn More About Discovery

Discovery happens continuously throughout all projects. Teams must continue to explore unknowns, validate decisions, and learn how to pivot in their vision. Even after launch!

Before you proceed with this page, learn about the project components, include the agile lifecycle:

🌿Agile Project Lifecycle2️⃣Continuous Discovery Milestone

Understanding the Current State of the World

Assumption Mapping

How does anyone know which work to decide, or which features to include, or which research to do first? YOU DON’T! You make the best judgment you have at the time and build consensus with the team to decide. Using tools like a prioritization matrix helps you decide quickly based on categories that matter to you. This workshop builds a templated process for a team to prioritize work based on risk and certainty, or effort and value, using what’s called a “MOSCOW” Matrix (which stands for Must, Should, Could, Won’t).

Use the Work Prioritization Template to perform assumption mapping during discovery with your team:

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1499950643904017083/work-prioritization-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Human-Centered Needs

Research Test Plans

UX is a scientific field! We UX’ers follow the Scientific Method in our work. We pose hypotheses and build tests to test the hypothesis. They are either true or false. Sometimes, the results are undetermined. In the context of Agile UX, UX’ers finish one single round of research in a short period of time known as “an iteration”. This could be one week, or two weeks, based on the Agile Method you are following. Teams must follow a repeated cycle of mapping questions and hypotheses to assumptions and points of measurement for the purposes of building a research test.

Use the Research Test Plan Template to create research plans during discovery using the assumption testing approach: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1496250421089805550/ux-research-test-plan-creation-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1496250421089805550/ux-research-test-plan-creation-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Research Analysis

After the research is performed, teams should analyze the results and form new assumptions from conclusions that were found.

Use the Research Analysis Template to perform analysis during discovery: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503447310956063367/ux-research-analysis-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503447310956063367/ux-research-analysis-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Personas

An audience persona represents traits about your audience. They help you team build for the needs of your audiences instead of building based on guess work. Personas don’t represent one person, but rather an entire audience, and should be generic to fit traits across all people within an audience. You do not need to know everything about your audience to create a persona! You can create a “proto-persona” full of guesses, and use it as a basis for assumption forming and assumption testing in UX work. The persona needs to be updated over time as you learn more about your audience.

Use the Personas Template to create summaries of your target audience segments and their traits, goals, pain points, motivations, and more: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1497229984848823193/audience-persona-definition-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1497229984848823193/audience-persona-definition-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Empathy Maps

Empathy maps help teams communicate how to build empathy with the current state of user audiences. They are used as tools to help teams understand the mindset and perspective of the audiences they are building for. This not only helps a UX team, but helps any other team seek the perspective of the user. The empathy map helps enable user-centered design in everything that teams do. This workshop helps teams create empathy maps for each of their persona audiences.

Use the Empathy Maps Template to document what your target audiences do, say, think, feel, value, and are motivated by: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1497223439047417750/empathy-map-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1497223439047417750/empathy-map-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Market Research

Teams should understand the state of the market and the opportunities for growth within the market. This comes with analyzing the total market cap of products that are similar to the product being built. Tools online offer abilities to look at market research and understand the market they're trying to enter. This is important in order to understand how "saturated" the market is before moving too far ahead with their work. If the market has too many other competitors that try to solve the same problems, then the team needs to strategize on how their product is going to uniquely provide value.

Use the Market Research Template to perform market research with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Direct and indirect competitors

There may be other products on the market that try to solve the same or similar problems. Vetting them is key to deciding how to differentiate your product from others. There could be products that have similar features and similar customers as yours, or products that indirectly solve the problems you are trying to solve. Teams should document and analyze all of this before moving ahead with their vision.

Use the Market Research Template to perform a competitor analysis during discovery with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Feature Comparison

Use the Market Research Template to perform a Feature Analysis during discovery with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Unique value proposition

If a product doesn't bring something uniquely valuable to the table, there's a low likelihood that users will abandon existing products and convert to the one your team's building. Refining a unique selling proposition takes analysis of the market and its competitors to understand what none of them do well.

Use the Market Research Template to perform a unique value proposition during discovery with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1503130355666295278/market-research-and-competitive-analysis-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Scenario-Based Problem Statements

The work that UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, product owners, and other roles do is not just engineering solutions. At the heart of it all, we in these roles solve problems. We either solve problems for our users, for clients who hire us, for colleagues, or for a business for which we work. Problem-solving is at the heart of the work. Not only do we need to solve problems, but we need to communicate the significance of the problem and convince people why it's worth solving. Without doing this, we're simply taking orders and who knows if the solution will actually be useful to someone in the world. That depends on whether the right problem is being solved, and whether it's solved in an efficient way.

Problem statements enable:

1. Research

2. Vision

3. Scope

4. Roadmap

Use the Problem Statement Generation Template to brainstorm scenario-based problems during discovery with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1501780960086225557/formal-problem-statement-and-use-case-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1501780960086225557/formal-problem-statement-and-use-case-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Customer Experience

Customer Experience depicts an end-to-end experience between the screens. Teams should use this to identify pain points before people start using digital tools and look at problems holistically.

There are two things that provide this ability for teams:

1. Customer Experience Maps

2. User Journey Maps

Here's a diagram showing the difference between them:

Customer Experience Mapping

A customer experience map is an essential piece of documenting the current and future customer experience for different audiences. It’s a great communication tool for teams to help others build empathy and understand how things work today for user audiences.

Use the Customer Experience Mapping Template to make this deliverable during discovery with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1500149108426942270/customer-experience-map-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1500149108426942270/customer-experience-map-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

User Journey Mapping

A user journey map is an essential piece of documenting the current experience for different audiences. It’s a great communication tool for teams to help others build empathy and understand how things work today for user audiences.

Use the User Journey Map Template to make a journey map during discovery with your team: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1499957535902105277/user-journey-map-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1499957535902105277/user-journey-map-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

Customer Experience Strategy

Teams should take their documented pain points and identify their purposeful intentions in the UX. Teams can perform customer experience strategy to enable their solution to meet needs outside of just screens or UI.

Use the Customer Experience strategy template to perform this activity with your team during the Discovery milestone: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1451244253959850076/customer-experience-strategy-workshop-template

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1451244253959850076/customer-experience-strategy-workshop-templatewww.figma.com

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