What is a Design and Discovery Workshop? Why do you need it?
The starting point for any digital project should be an effective Design & Discovery phase. Whether you are starting with a guiding vision or reviewing an existing digital portfolio, the same is true. At Vidatec, we work with organisations of all sizes, from large multi-national enterprises to start-ups to help them truly ground their vision.
Our Design & Discovery phase brings key stakeholders on the client side together with our team of experts, including across UI/UX, Technical Leads and PMO. We customise our approach around your needs and the potential complexity of the requirement, with the ability to explore some areas in greater detail such as User Personas, Branding, App and Web design, platform architecture etc.
Key objectives for a Design & Discover session would typically include:
1. Understand your business challenges and digital vision
The first stage of our process is learning and understanding more about your business. We will hear about the drive behind creating your product and why you want to build it. This information will help us begin to capture your business requirements and open up discussion on what the product aims to accomplish. We want to figure out how this may be measured in order to evaluate what success looks like. It is important we know about your goals and business objectives at this stage for reference throughout the workshop.
2. Learn about user personas, motivations and needs
We take a human-centred approach to our mobile and web app design. To ensure we gain an in-depth understanding and really empathise with your users to provide a strong user experience.
3. Define ways to improve your digital service by mapping your end-user journey
We work with you to map out the end-user journey of your mobile app/web app. At each step in this journey, we identify the associated actions in each step, any happy moments, potential pain points and opportunities to improve this, all while looking for answers to any questions that come up along the way.
4. Feature Exploration & Prioritisation
This is a core stage within the workshop, when we go through the required features at a high level, before exploring them in more detail one by one while constantly considering the technical feasibility of each one. This stage may involve mapping out additional user flows. We can then identify the features required to deliver the minimum value proposition (MVP). With any additional features prioritised in terms of the value each one provides against the level of effort that is required to produce it.
5. Design Exploration
We will review examples of your branding and use this to inform the overall theme and the visual design of the mobile/web application.
6. Branding
We would expect some branding to work from during the Design & Discovery workshop; this would include a logo, fonts and possibly a colour scheme to use. We would collate all this and create a style guide that we would work from throughout the building process, meaning all your systems would have the correct identity. We do offer a branding workshop as well if this is something that would be needed.
7. Beyond the workshop
After the workshop our team will produce the technical specification document and demonstrate a clickable prototype. This really helps to bring your ideas to life, fully validate the end-user experience and how it could be built. This will also support the all important next stage of securing budget and or funding.
The Product Specification document includes:
- MVP feature report
- A technical scope and architecture recommendation
- User flows of non-trivial features
- Information architecture (Sitemap)
- Design key journeys
- Fully functional app design & build estimate
If your interested to find out more, talk to our sales team about how a Design and Discovery Workshop can help you transform your end-user experience – turn your vision into a reality.