1.2. Discovery
1.2.1 Objective
Next, you’ll engage and learn with your users. You will get to know the individuals that will be using our product, and learn about the context they will be using it. You’ll learn about their challenges and problems.
1.2.2 What you will be doing
1.2.3 Steps and tools you can use
a. Conduct a kick-off session with key stakeholders
A kick-off session is one of the first opportunities for the teams (ours and stakeholders/customers) to know each other, discuss ways of working together and start aligning project’s vision and objectives.
Things that are relevant to cover during a kick-off session:
Brief presentation of Catalpa and project’s team
Our process and ways of working: 1) we design with people, 2) participatory design, 3) human-centred design, 4) agile methodologies
Key goals for the project, that can include: design/inception phase, MVP (and what it means), release plan and core functionalities, milestones and deliverables, etc.
If you have time, consider using this session to conduct a first HCD/co-design exercise. It is a great opportunity to demo to your partners how we will be working together. Besides, it is a great moment and opportunity as well to learn more about their expectations, aspirations and concerns. For the kick-off session, here are some exercises that you can consider to conduct:
Ice-breaker - helps everyone getting in the right mood to collaborate and share
What is their pain points?
What is their expectation?
For both exercises you can use silent brainstorming, discussions and dot voting to conduct a productive and all-hands exercises, making sure all voices in the room are heard. If you have some prior knowledge and understanding of their pains and expectations, you might also use a attributes sliders, mind mapping or user journeys tools.
Here are the slides used for the kick-off of Partisipa/PNDS-MIS work.
b. Align your design questions with requirements
Based on your design challenge, framing and the requirements of your client, you will need to prepare the design questions that you will be trying to answer in the next steps. The exercises you will be doing to learn about the users will all be based on answering these design questions.
Write down the questions you want to try to answer in this phase. Questions may be open-ended (encourage people to reflect) or closed questions (call for specific answers). Read more about types of questions and anatomy of a good question in this blog.
Your questions should help you learn more about the users and their context, while keeping in mind the original requirements.
c. Learn about the users and their context
Design and conduct a discovery workshop *🥇
First you need to decide what format and tools you will use in the session to allow you to start answering the design questions that were identified. Consider the design questions and the resources available to define the format of the workshops, exercises and tools to use and who should participate.
Select your audience - identify key stakeholders of the process you are designing for and invite them to participate in the session.
Define exercises you will conduct in the workshop and prepare the tools. It is important to keep the design questions, the audience and the nature of the workshop (in-person, remote, mix) top of mind in order to select the most adequate exercises and tools. Some tools we frequently use at Catalpa are:
Mood boards: a type of visual presentation or 'collage' consisting of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition. It can be based on a set topic. A mood board can be used to convey a general idea or feeling about a particular topic - here is an example of how we used a mood board to explore the visual language and style we want for Bero illustration system. And here is another example of how DIRD team used it to identify possible styling paths to present maps in the DIRD platform. If you want to learn more about Mood boards, we suggest this useful article.
Silent brainstorming (or silent storming): a quick way for a group to come up with several of ideas about a topic or how to solve a question. Using this exercise, participants generate ideas while everyone remains quiet. This allows participants to think without distractions or influence from other participants and helps combat problems of groupthink and social loafing, common to traditional brainstorming sessions. Usually participants are given a question or a topic by a facilitator (that can also participant in the exercise) and have a time is set to complete the exercise - for example, 5 minutes. During that time, individuals will silently write down their ideas in sticky notes that are posted in a board after the activity so that everyone can see them. Most commonly ideas are shared in word or sentence format, but sometimes it may also be useful to sketches or rapid draws.
Here is a template to help you organise a successful brainstorming session (includes discussion/gurus walk/swarming and dot voting).
The template includes a section to add the results from the session. This is a fundamental step so you can share the findings and key results and make them available to everyone on your team
Dot voting (or dotmocracy, sticker voting or multi-voting): an easy to implement facilitation method of group voting. Commonly participants will use dot stickers or a pen to mark their preferred ideas / answers on a certain topic. Participants are provided by a limited number of stickers/votes and a time is set for each member of the group to vote in ther preferred ideas. This method is used to identify a team’s/co-hort preferences from a list of options, making the decision-marking process more democratic, easy and quick. It helps identify most popular choices and inform the next phase of the product design process.
You can find out more on how to use dot voting in the brainstorming session template.
Rapid sketching: a collaborative sketching exercise that helps to quickly and effectively explore initial ideas and start making design decisions. This collaborative exercise allows a multidisciplinary team to interact over a design question and come up with viable solutions. The objective is to produce a variety of ideas and explore potential solutions together. You don’t need to know how to draw to participate in the rapid sketching exercise, the idea is not to draw but rather to put visual and experience ideas on paper so they can be discussed and iterated by the group of participants and later used by the product team.
Here is an inVision Freehand template ready for you to use. Don’t forget to make a new copy and customise the questions for the exercise you prepared
Similar to a brainstorming session, this exercise begins with presenting a problem or design question to the participants. Participants are giving a set period (minutes) to come up with ideas and prepare rapid sketches to demonstrate these to their peers. After sketching, each participant will share their thoughts and the team will discuss each idea.
This exercise can be conducted in-person or remotely, using an online tool such as Miro or InVision’s freehand.
See how we used a rapid sketching exercise with the Bero product team to iterate the homepage of the app. The core of the exercise is the rapid sketching, although we combined a mix of brainstorming and dot voting to take the most out of the collaborative session.
Discussions: in any collaborative session it is important to plan for discussions as part of every exercise. When people are generating ideas, they will want to talk about their ideas, ask others about their ideas and, if we are being successful, even merging ideas or build upon of others’ ideas. For discussions to be open, honest and productive, it is important to set up the room in advance. This means, ensuring we have an open, friendly and democratic vibe in the room, and that everyone will have the opportunity to share their thoughts. It is usually better to start with an ice breaker or an exercise that will help making people feel safe, included and willing to working together as a team.
Attributes slider: a useful exercise as an ice breaker or to learn how people feel about a topic/question.
A good ice breaker using attributes slides is to present 2 opposing options and ask people to share their thoughts. For example, ‘I would rather’ ‘have a rewind button or a pause button on my life?’. See how Jerasaun Foun successfully used this exercise (2nd board of this Jamboard) to create an open and collaborative mindset for a broader discovery exercise.
Attributes slider(s) can also be used on exercises where you are trying to identify key aspects for something, such as design principles.
As an example, you could have a slider for the question ‘The platform X is: Fun and easy < > Formal for work tool’
Mind mapping: a tool used to generate, visualise, and organise ideas. Mind maps can visually show hierarchy, relationships between elements and start organising structures or information. Mind maps can take many forms depending on your topic, some examples include: central/starting point, timely representation, empathy/relationship, hierarchy, among others. It can be a powerful problem-solving tool by assisting brainstorming and collaborating. It is also useful for mapping complex environments or challenges.
There are a number of mind map templates on Miro - look for mind mapping in the templates list.
You can also see mind mapping in action - we used it to map the complex and iterative flow of Catalpa’s product design and development process. This became the starting point for this guide you are looking at right now!
Most commonly, a combination of several tools and activities are required to help you gather and organise the information you will need. For example, it is very common at Catalpa to do a silent brainstorming or a rapid sketching followed by a dot voting. This way we give everyone the time and opportunity to share their ideas and insights, while also harnessing group decision making to determine which ideas are worth further exploring.
A checklist for the discovery workshop can be a helpful tool to make sure everything is planned and ready for the session. It will help make sure everything is in place and that all facilitators know what they need to take care of.
During and after the workshop, the facilitator will need to collect all assets generated. You may take pictures, record videos, audio, take notes, save files or just fold physical boards. It is important to make sure that all assets are collected so that you will be able to ‘download’ and analyse them later.
Download and analyse the results of the workshop. This may be conducted in a range of ways but usually encompasses a collection, review and analysis of all assets generated, followed by transferring all assets into a format easily accessed by the team. This could be text and images on a Google doc, a freehand board on InVision or even Google slides. Use the format that best suits the nature of the collected assets as well as your team’s ways of working.
Here is a great example of a well thought out, organised and conduct discovery workshop done by Partisipa team. The workshop was conducted in-person, with a group of >30 users and stakeholders and it lasted about 4 hours. Here you can find some documentation that was done to design and prepare the exercise, and here you can find the slides that were used for the workshop. As usual in this type of exercises, the team was ready to improvise and respond to participants reaction and constraints during the session.
Design and conduct ICT readiness assessment 🥇
Identify participants, methods, and the tool that you will be using for the survey. Here is a good example from the ACIAR Learn project.
Online survey - we frequently use Google forms - see the example of how we used a Google form to conduct an ICT readiness survey for Estrada project
In-person surveys - you may print the Google form and either use it as an interview script (asking the questions to the participant) or deliver it to the participant and ask them to fill it in and deliver the paper form back to you.
Phone surveys - similar to in-person questionnaires, if you can’t meet the participant in-person, you may call them and ask the questions over a phone call.
If you are asking others to conduct the ICT readiness assessment or help with data collection, you should make sure they understand the objective, the tool and the target audience. Here is a presentation we prepared for the Kumul Helt Skul project, to guide others to conduct and support the data collection process.
To better understand the ICT context, you may want to perform a literature review. This involves checking any relevant available documentation for your product. Some examples include existing studies about ICT readiness, digital literacy, regional and national strategic plans, national census, and any legal or regulatory rules your product must adhere to.
Preparing an ICT Readiness assessment report is important to ensure that the results of the assessment are recorded and easy to read/consult in any future step of product development. You will need to download and review all the information collected using surveys or literature review, prepare relevant stats and present a summary of findings that is easy to access and informative for those making decisions around the product. See an example of a simple summary of the Estrada ICT readiness survey and here a more detailed one conducted for Pacific Learn.
Engage with the users and observe their context
Identify your ‘product champions’ - key users that have time and are willing to collaborate and provide further insight
Prepare the tools to:
Conduct surveys with your users and analyse the results. Here are some examples of how we did this on Kumul Helt Skul to learn about context’s visual language and understand how cultural elements and iconography could be suitable for the product users in their context:
Look and feel survey (using Google forms)
Conduct interviews with users, 1-on-1 or focus groups. You can find a great example from ACIAR Learn with a well detailed plan that includes purpose, methodology and interview questions.
Immerse and observe - although this method is time consuming, it gives the product team a great opportunity to explore the context and daily routines of users. This gives a much deeper understanding of the problems, pains and challenges of the user, as well as the opportunities for the product to improve their life. You can skip this step if your project is time poor, or you could consider integrating this method in a timely manner that will suit your constraints. For example, if you are visiting the place where the user will operate/interact with the system, you may consider extending your visit for a couple of hours and observing the user interacting in the context and with the business processes. This will provide an opportunity to ask questions or get users to show you how they usually perform task X or solve problem Y.
Collect other relevant assets *🥇
Identify and map any relevant assets that you and the team will need to access in order to design and develop the product.
Collect available datasets - these could be spreadsheets containing data that needs to be imported to the product database, shapefiles, other databases, images, logos, learning content etc. It includes anything that you may need to import to the database of the product, or that you need to explore in order to make decisions about how the product should work.
Collect existing templates and standards used within the business system where the product will operate. This can include reporting formats, checklists used for the activity, etc.
Collect available manuals, standard operating procedures (SOPs), monitoring & evaluation (M&E) frameworks, and any other materials being used in the field where your product will operate.
Make sure that you have all collected assets mapped, for example in a Google sheet, and that they are available to your team (ideally in the team Google drive).
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