A Beginner’s Guide to Design Discovery

Magnus Lundström
4 min readNov 8, 2022

If you’re a designer, then you know the importance of design discovery during the design process. Many designers and clients do not understand why design discovery is essential and don’t include it in their design processes. If you don’t know anything about it, then we are here to help.

We will look into what design discovery is, why you need it in your design process, and how you can add design discovery to your design process.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

What Is Design Discovery?

Design discovery is about the research required before a product’s design begins. This is necessary to ensure the product’s design is successful and that users find the experience valuable.

You need to spend enough time in the design discovery phase to ensure it’s effective. The longer you focus on this, the better the results will be. You need to find out what the UX requirements are for the product you are designing, what the competitors of the product are doing, how well it works for the competitors, what improvements can be made that users want, and more.

By the end of the design discovery phase, you should have all the information you need to start designing the product. You should clearly understand the goal of the product’s design and what direction you need to go.

Questions You Need To Answer During The Design Discovery Phase

What Is The Problem You Need To Solve For The Users

You need to know what problems the product design needs to solve. You need to have a clear understanding of the problem. This will help the UX design process to be completed quicker and with the least amount of issues. You will not know where to begin if you don’t know what problem or problems you need to solve.

If you need help identifying the problem, you can consult with a UI UX design firm that has experience with all of this. Once you know the problem that needs to be solved, then you can move on to the next question that needs to be answered before the design work begins.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

What Is The Preferred Solution To The Problem Users Are Having

When you know the problem, you can identify a solution that will fix that problem. You need to know what answer you want to create for the pain that users have to deal with. When you see the problem, you will know what direction the design process needs.

Before deciding on a solution, you should go through it and choose the best one. Understand why the option you have chosen is the best one. How does it help the users, and why is it more effective than the others? Is there a way for the results to be measured so they can be tested before it’s incorporated into the design? All of these questions and more need to be answered. You might need to communicate all of this information to clients who might need to gain technical knowledge. That’s why you need to have a clear understanding, and testing all of this will help you get feedback and data that you can show to the clients during your explanations.

What Are The Restrictions That You Need To Design Around?

You should know the restrictions you will need to deal with when creating the design for the product. If you don’t know these before you start, you will need to deal with problems that could have been avoided. This could cost you more time and resources that you might not have.

If the guidelines for the product’s design are limiting, then you need to design the solution around those limitations.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash
Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Using The Research From The Design Discovery Phase

The design discovery phase doesn’t have strict guidelines that you need to follow. All that matters is completing the goals of the discovery phase before you start designing the UX for your product. This is what will ensure the success of your product.

When you have collected all the information you need for the product’s design, this includes understanding the problems that users have, how these problems can be solved, why users want these problems solved, and the best way to do it; you can then process and analyze the information.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

After the information has been analyzed and you have all the insights you need, you can identify the direction the design discovery process should go in. This will help you avoid wasting time and making mistakes.

A plan is vital if you want to be successful and design a UX design that people will want to use. It would help if you created a plan before designing the product. The more detailed the design project is, the easier it will be for you to accomplish what you want.

Good luck!

--

--