Discovery

Website discovery

Website discovery is the first step in creating a website. It is about learning what the website needs to do, who it is for, and how it should work - before any design or coding begins.

Discovery is important for:

• helping teams understand the goals of the project
• identifying the needs of users and what problems they face
• setting a clear direction, so everyone knows what to build and why
• a way to gather all the important information before starting design
• a chance to understand the business, users, and competitors

It is a process that usually includes kick-off meetings, user research, and goal setting.

Research

Research in websites is about learning what users need, how they behave, and what problems they face - so you can design a website that works well for them.

It helps you:

• understand your users and what they are trying to do
• spot issues with current designs
• test ideas before building anything
• make sure the final website is easy to use and meets real needs

User research is done to understand our users so we can design solutions that suit their needs. By doing this, we are more likely to create the right solution for that user group.

Even without full user research inclusion, we can develop a good understanding of our business and users from existing data and research.

The process

We will always start by speaking to you, and find out what you are trying to achieve for the business and the user.

We will ask

• what is the motivation for this work?
• what are the strategic goals this is linked to?
• what are the benefits to the council by doing this work?
• what are the benefits to Cumberland residents by doing this work?

We will consider

• what the overall purpose is
• who the end users are
• who the stakeholders are, and what they are expecting and hoping for
• what the constraints are
• what is already in place
• what the problems and/or opportunities are
• what the biggest and riskiest assumptions are, and whether they are valid
• who has tried to do similar things before, and what they learned
• what the different options might be (including not doing anything)

Possible activities

• investigate the brief from the business, feeding back and refining if necessary, to focus on problems and not solutions
• stakeholder mapping
• identify user groups
• find existing data and information about any existing comparable products and services
• identify service owner
• identify constraints (such as policy, legal, tech)
• stakeholder interviews

Possible outputs

• problem statement and context
• user stories
• as-is journey or service map
• as-is technical map or dependencies
• paint points from the as-is journey map

Responsibility and timescale

Responsibility - The Digital team will work with service owners and other stakeholders to gather all the initial information to scope out the work during the discovery phase. Although we are very experienced in what is needed to build a great website, we will welcome your point of view and thoughts.

Timescale - Dependent on scale.