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Discovery phase: UX activities & research methods to consider

Myrto Papagiannakou
UX Collective
Published in
7 min readSep 8, 2020
Vibrant illustration showing a team sitting at their desks and collaborating at the office.
Illustration by Freepik Stories: Most of the time, the design of a new project, service, product, or feature starts with a discovery phase.

Almost any design cycle for a new project, service, product, or feature starts with a discovery phase. During this phase, we usually collaborate with business and other stakeholders to:

  • research the landscape and gain insights about the current situation
  • define our challenge and frame the right problem to solve
  • collect insights and align on our first steps for the next phase

There are many standard UX Methods and Activities, and I know from the experience I have with my students that it’s quite tricky for young designers to decide which would be the most appropriate to combine for each Design Phase.

This article will concentrate my efforts on the first phase of the design cycle and try to walk you through the UX Workshops and User Research Methods that we may combine and use in our project’s Discovery Phase.

Illustration showing two colleagues agree on ideas and priorities
Illustration by Freepik Stories: We facilitate a shared vision amongst stakeholders, and gain alignment on the next steps

As UXers, our primary goals during this phase are

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Written by Myrto Papagiannakou

Senior UX Consultant, Human-Centered Designer, UX Mentor, and Berlin lover. Enthusiastic about life, she believes in love, and occasionally in people.

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Hi, great tips.
I would just be carefull about some of the visual examples in this article because some of those lack a suffiscient contrast ratio between text and background and can lead to accessibility problems.
The 7. is missleading for me for…

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Thanks for sharing this. To your first point about lighter text, I see you’ve lightened the colour as well as the weight of the font. If designers are changing colours of text, you will need to make sure that these colour contrasts still adhere to…

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Tints & Shades

How do you pick tints and shades? Is there a tool for that?

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