During our Discovery Phase, Team Spirit quickly develops a deep understanding of your project’s unique challenges by absorbing your team’s vision and the collective knowledge that resides in the minds of the people within your organization and in existing reports and other documents. Through intensive knowledge-transfer sessions with your executives and key members of your product team, we learn more about your business objectives that the project will fulfill, the problems that you need us to solve, and your organizational resources and capabilities that can benefit the project.

Discovery for Digital Product Design Projects

During our Discovery Phase for your digital product design project, Team Spirit learns about

• your product vision
• the history of your product design project from
• your product team’s collective knowledge
• any documents that record your product’s design history, including existing reports and design documents
• any prior versions of your product or related products
• your organization’s product development process
• your user experience design guidelines
• your corporate and product branding guidelines
• your proposed product’s
• task or information domain
• market requirements
• target users
• technical innovations and the opportunities they provide
• technical constraints

By interviewing subject-matter experts in the task or information domain that your digital product addresses, Team Spirit begins discovering what user needs, desires, and preferences your product must satisfy. For an existing digital product, Team Spirit interviews employees of your company who have direct contact with users—including technical support representatives, market researchers, sales representatives, and business development managers—to learn about your current users and their characteristics, needs, desires, and preferences. Team Spirit also studies any available documentation that records user feedback about your product.

Team Spirit also reviews available literature about your digital product domain—including books, articles, market research reports, technology white papers, marketing collateral, and Web sites—to increase our awareness of the business issues affecting your product domain and our understanding of the underlying technology.

Discovery Phase Goals

Our primary goals during our Discovery Phase are to

• understand your digital product domain
• ascertain the degree to which your proposed product or any current version of your product is usable
• learn about the characteristics of the target users for your product
• determine what user needs, desires, and preferences your product must satisfy
• discover what tasks your product must support
• determine what information needs your product must address

Overview of Discovery Phase Activities

Our Discovery Phase encompasses usability evaluation, competitive analysis, user research and modeling, task analysis, card sorting, and user requirements definition.

By performing an expert design review, Team Spirit can quickly assess the degree to which any proposed or current version of your digital product is usable and identify areas for improvement. To help your product team understand your product domain better, Team Spirit can also supplement available information by planning and conducting new research. We can perform a competitive analysis of your competitors’ products or subject your product or prototype or a competitor’s product to usability testing to ascertain how well it is currently meeting the needs of your target users.

To design and build a digital product that people need, Team Spirit and your product team must first know your target users. To develop an understanding of your target users’ characteristics, goals, needs, desires, preferences, and tasks, Team Spirit observes the work of and interviews representative or actual users. We can also conduct surveys and focus groups to learn about a broader spectrum of users.

Working in collaboration with members of your product team, Team Spirit develops several personas—which are fictional user archetypes that are representative of your target users—then analyzes your product’s task domain from the personas’ perspectives. Team Spirit identifies and analyzes the workflows for your target users’ high-priority tasks and begins refining or redefining them to improve their efficiency or usefulness. Finally, working collaboratively, Team Spirit and your product team define user requirements for your digital product, which determine the scope and functionality of the product that your team will design and build.