3 Reasons that Discovery is Vital to Your Next Redesign

A discovery phase is focused around planning and setting your scope. Detailing out this process will reduce the risk of missed deadlines and exceeding budgets. It allows you to understand the full scope of the redesign and what it will take to show success. 

Ideally, a discovery should take place before setting a hard budget for the project, but oftentimes a budget is set before the project starts with very little wiggle room. A discovery will allow you to understand what can be accomplished in that budget, and where you may need additional budget to accomplish your goals. This is so important for leadership and stakeholder conversations so that you are able to help them understand what they can expect during the redesign process and where certain items may go above and beyond the planned scope and budget of the project. This helps to keep stakeholder expectations realistic, and prepares them to advocate when more investment may be needed. 

Many redesign projects also include third-party integrations or custom features that can lead to hidden costs. You can uncover these costs and the scope of the feature during a discovery phase to be sure that these are accounted for. This can really help leaders understand the customisations that may be needed, the long-term strategy for the website, and help get the focus on more than just how the homepage looks.

When communicating changes during a redesign, there are always stakeholders that feel a bit uncomfortable or can feel challenged by new technologies, because you are introducing new processes that impact the way they are comfortable working. Stakeholders need to feel like they can trust you to meet their needs and that you are providing a positive brand experience to their audiences. 

Discovery can help build stakeholder confidence in the solution you are proposing. Research into their greatest needs helps build trust and provide them with information about their needs and goals. In this phase, stakeholders can be involved by providing their feedback, and how they would like to see the platform improved to meet their needs as well as their primary audience’s needs. 

While it is impossible to meet all stakeholder wants and needs with a redesign, a discovery can give you the information to make decisions around what can be prioritised, what may be set for a second phase of the project with an additional budget, and what may need to have a different solution altogether. A discovery phase allows stakeholders to be heard and helps project leads be able to set expectations and obtain the appropriate research against any needs and wants that could impact the scope of the project.

The discovery phase helps to lay the groundwork to future-proof your technical architecture for a more effortless, faster and more flexible development experience. This phase can focus on auditing the current state of the site, understanding business processes, and checking for user and compliance issues. Having a full inventory of features, issues, and content needs helps you understand where there may be opportunities to keep your system flexible and agile and determine where the budget should be invested in the future. A well-built platform can help get your content out to the right audience at the right time in their journey, and the discovery phase will target those needs and help to build a platform focused on optimisations that will sustain your brand vision. 

When stakeholders are eager for a new website, it is hard to think about the future roadmap and where the site can go, but building this into the discovery process helps you limit the initial scope and have a roadmap for moving forward. It helps you anticipate trends and automate processes that can help save time and budget in the future and allows your organisation to invest more in optimisations towards their primary goals without rebuilding the entire platform. 

Every project is unique, and some projects may need more discovery time than others. Oftentimes, we can pull research that can be repurposed, speak to experts who have studied the website audience or have access to a very well-documented platform spec that has the necessary features for building out requirements. These can all help reduce the time and effort that goes into a discovery phase while still determining the scope and budget for a project. 

• Identify and interview stakeholders about the website’s needs/goals/concerns/successes 
• Find trends and build business goals based on feedback 
• Collect qualitative/quantitative data that backs up opinions & concerns about the site 

• Measure the current performance of the site against KPIs 
• Identify user behaviour problems to solve with new user experiences 
• Build a measurement plan and begin benchmarking against new goals

• Conduct user interviews and moderated user tests 
• Understand how users navigate the website, test labels and where content lives 
• Journey mapping and content mapping

• Conduct technical audits on the current site setup 
• Identify third-party integrations, workflows, features and hosting improvements 
• Migration & redirect mapping