Discovery Artifacts
Persona development
To understand how a user would use your product, you must start by understanding that user. What drives them? What are they trying to accomplish with your product? How frequently or infrequently do they do certain tasks? What is their skill level?
User Task Matrix
Understanding all the tasks performed by all the target personas of a product lets us group similar personas and features to use in navigation strategy and feature design.
Investigating Existing workflows
Understanding how an end user accomplishes their tasks today and what pain points they need to overcome gives us a starting point for a number of things: where to focus our energy on the redesign, how we can reinvent a workflow and what parts we should leave alone, and where is the customer ROI after we implement a new and improved workflow.
STAKEHOLDER SYNTHESIS
Last in this set of artifacts but not least - synthesizing the feedback from all the stakeholders to make sure there is consensus on direction and priorities is key to a healthy working relationship. Understanding what their main expectations are regarding the design principles that should be applied to the design will be helpful guides.
