What is Discovery?

Ever worked on a project where the team was never quite on the same page?

Me too.

The root cause is often that teams don't have a shared understanding of the problem they're solving or who they're solving it for. Discovery is here to solve that.

Discovery answers the question: what problem are we solving, for whom, and how will we know if it worked?

Discovery is about understanding both organisational and user needs. About uncovering goals, risks, and assumptions. About listening and defining problems, not jumping to solutions.

Discovery isn't something you quickly tick off and move to design. It's an attitude you carry throughout the project.

You're constantly learning – about your users, your content, your constraints. You don't reach a moment where you know everything and the designing begins. That said, there's usually concentrated discovery work at the start of a project to build that shared understanding before you commit to a direction.

What does that early discovery work look like? It varies based on project size and budget, but at minimum it involves speaking with key people in your organisation to understand what they actually need (which is often different from what they say they want). One-to-one conversations with stakeholders and senior leadership are essential. Cross-departmental surveys give you a broader view. Support teams, for example, often spot user pain points that others miss. End-user research is equally important. Workshops are a great way of bringing people together for focused, collaborative sessions that produce shared ownership.

By the end of this initial work, you should understand your business goals and constraints, who your key audiences are and what they need, what's working on your current site and what isn't, and what's in scope for this project.

Discovery sets up everything that follows. Get it right and the rest of the project becomes clearer.