Discovery Phase

Find out what users need, determine project constraints, and prioritize

What do you know about your users, and what are you assuming? Do your services meet their needs? Can the website help you meet organizational goals in ways you might not have considered?

Each time you start a project, it’s important to consider its unique context. What are your audiences doing on the website? Why? What else are they doing in their day-to-day lives related to their health care, education, or research, and how can the website help them?

You’ll look at resources (human and otherwise), policies, technical requirements, and anything else you can find. You’ll interview stakeholders, gather analytics, and review existing data.

Objectives

The discovery phase helps you understand users’ needs, review existing services, and identify gaps between the two. You’ll also get a better understanding of the people, interfaces, and infrastructure involved.

This fresh look at your entire operation will help you:

• establish baseline metrics and set targets for improvement
• identify red routes for users — like finding a doctor or applying to school
• understand what language and navigational schema make sense to your users
• identify differences between the content you offer and what users are seeking

The Team

You’ll need to gather:

• your unit’s stakeholders
• front-line people who can walk you through current work processes
• anyone who will be making updates or creating new web content
• members of the core project team on the unit’s side
• the Web Initiatives team

Timeline

This phase should take 4-8 weeks, depending on the amount of audience research you perform.

Outputs

In the discovery phase, you’ll get:

• a prioritized list of user needs
• input from stakeholders
• a clear set of goals for the project
• contact with project team members and partners
• information about existing services
• analytics data showing how your current site is performing
• a content strategy
• audience research data
• maybe a competitive audit
• possibly some personas