Creating Effective Discovery Documentation
Discovery, generally defined as the first 20% of a design project, gives your team confidence you’re building the right thing. Through discovery, you uncover requirements, constraints, and insights–everything that informs the design process. Discovery is more than research and stakeholder interviews: It's the process your team uses to get aligned and focused. That process yields a discovery document (maybe you call it a design brief or a UX strategy). Whatever you call it, the best discovery documents set the stage for the rest of the project. What's the best way to put together a discovery document? In this presentation you'll find out! Specifically, you’ll learn:
- The six kinds of outputs from the discovery process
- Recipes for composing effective discovery deliverables
- Strategies for determining the right recipe
Is this talk for you? Dan has geared this talk to anyone working on a product or design team who:
- Participates in some part of discovery
- Makes decisions about a digital product or web site based on discovery
- Contributes to or uses discovery documentation
About Dan Brown
Information Architect and Principal at EightShapes
Since 1994, Dan Brown has focused on digital product discovery and definition, user research, information architecture, content strategy and interaction design for content-heavy sites, complex web applications, and digital products. He’s worked on teams large and small to perfect collaboration and productivity. In 2006, Dan co-founded EightShapes with Nathan Curtis to serve clients in healthcare, education, not-for-profit, and high-tech.
Please note that EightShapes is not to be confused with Eightlines, the creative endeavour run by past Fluxible speaker Brent Marshall. But the similarity in names is still pretty cool. Now we just need to find a speaker who runs a UX consultancy called Eightpoints!
Dan is also the author of several books, including Surviving Design Projects and Designing Together. He also has a forthcoming book, Practical Design Discovery, for us all to to look forward to. He may have consumed coffee while writing these books.