Prepare for design the smart way

(FAQ) You might be wondering:

• What is product UX discovery?

  Product UX discovery is a series of both consistent and non-linear user-experience-related activities laying the solid foundation for your product’s design and development. By adding this discovery process, the company you have entrusted to design your products (in this case, our team at Merge) plans to cut down the risks of creating the wrong thing. This pre-design step lets our product designers significantly reduce uncertainty before moving on to the next steps and gives any of their future decisions a well-researched background. Overall, product discovery is a certain period of time at the beginning of your project’s creation where we focus on research to generate and transform ideas into the right solutions for you.

• What are the benefits of a product UX discovery phase?

  Whether we intend to improve a product of yours that’s already in use or create a whole new solution from scratch, the benefits are clear and indisputable. The most apparent advantages involve: • Filling the gap between a detached idea and its value to users before the eventual realization of the design approach. • Bringing all our team members together around a shared understanding of what the project should be. • Preventing cost overruns by planning the project’s budget more thoughtfully thanks to the opportunities to test and validate concepts before committing to them. • Better risk management - we can identify and mitigate problems and potential risks before starting the design phase. • Setting more realistic deadlines and boundaries due to our team establishing a more accurate scope of work.

• How do you organize the stakeholder workshop?

  First, we organize a meeting with stakeholders (technically, our second meeting, the first one is the intro call) where we show them the presentation about our product UX discovery presentation. After the call, our team prepares the follow-up that involves sending our clients a stakeholder questionnaire that’s tailored to their unique needs and requirements for the project. The questionnaire includes dozens of relevant questions about the project, the client’s business, known direct and indirect competitors, and the target audience, all of which are meant to deepen our understanding of the future product. We send this questionnaire together with the presentation and the NDA and then go through it at the workshop itself, which usually lasts no less than an hour.

• Who is typically involved in the UX discovery process?

  UX discovery process truly is a cross-functional collaboration since it involves the input of almost all members of the team, plus the involvement of the product owners and stakeholders from the client’s company. We don’t have a strict classification of roles inside this process, which means, for example, that UX research doesn’t solely belong to UX designers. We all collaborate and share a single purpose. There are always team members from the Merge side who: • Plan and perform user research, interviews, and qualitative and quantitative studies - for example, user researchers, UX designers, etc. • Hold discussions with decision-makers from our client’s side and make sure we understand the requirements - head of support, sales representatives, project managers, and marketing managers. • Lead the team and facilitate workshops - product managers, project managers, delivery managers, service designers, etc.

• What is the desired outcome of the discovery phase?

  At the end of the discovery phase, the desired outcome involves a research-backed validation of our best ideas and a complete understanding of the problems we need to address and the tasks we need to perform. In more precise terms, it means our team has to produce and possess: • Detailed user personas based on accurate data that will help us create a user-oriented design afterward. • A final service blueprint (information architecture) and a backlog list of all the product's tasks, bugs, updates, and new features. • Detailed user journey and user flow maps. • Low-fidelity UX wireframes as a simplified visual representation of the future product.

• How do your UX designers discover new ideas?

  Our designers come up with new ideas through constant loops of research and brainstorming. Our team members create multiple hypotheses of how the product should look and feel like based on the insights we get from group meetings. Our collective observations from user studies data and contextual inquiries allow us to produce concepts much more user-oriented as opposed to ideas we would have gotten just by aiming at novelty designs. Inspiration is secondary. We don’t wait for the right idea to fall on our heads - we go and look for it through hours of research and subsequent innovation. The more information we get from the outside, the more thought-out product will eventually become.