A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making, 3rd Edition

5 Discovery

The Work to Find Out if the Work You're About to Do Is the Right Work—or Not.

Discovery is the upfront work of making sure the work you think you need to engage in is the right work to be doing at all. It’s the research-based, investigative process you go through to validate a hypothesis. You’ll need to listen to and observe a lot of people to understand whether you’re solving the right challenge, and what the real challenge might be. Synthesizing all you learn, you’ll identify recommendations and potential solutions. Or you might learn that the challenge is not one worth spending time and resources on solving. And that would be a successful discovery too—consider how focus could be directed toward more high-value projects (after ...