What Is Web Design Discovery?
Web design discovery is the first step in creating a website.
It’s about learning what the website needs to do, who it’s for, and how it should work—before any design or coding begins.
Why it’s important
- It helps teams understand the goals of the project.
- It identifies the needs of users and what problems they face.
- It sets a clear direction so everyone knows what to build and why.
- A way to gather all the important information before starting design.
- A chance to understand the business, users, and competitors.
A process that usually includes kick-off meetings, user research, and goal setting
What Research Means in Web Design
Research in web design is about learning what users need, how they behave, and what problems they face—so you can design a website that works well for them.
It helps you:
- Understand your users and what they’re trying to do.
- Spot issues with current designs.
- Test ideas before building anything.
- Make sure the final website is easy to use and meets real needs.
User research is done to understand our users so we can design solutions that suit their needs. By doing this, we are more likely to create the right solution for that user group.
Even without full user research inclusion, we can develop a good understanding of our business and users from existing data and research.
What is included?
We will always start by speaking to you, and find out what you are trying achieve for the business and the user.
We will ask
- What is the motivation for this work?
- What are the strategic goals this is linked to?
- What are the benefits to the council by doing this work? (What do we get out of doing this?)
- What are the benefits to Somerset residents by doing this work? (What do our residents get out of doing this?)
We will consider
- what the overall purpose is
- who the end users are
- who the stakeholders are, and what they are expecting and hoping for
- what the constraints are
- what’s already in place
- what the problems and/or opportunities are
- what the biggest and riskiest assumptions are, and whether they are valid
- who has tried to do similar things before, and what they learned
- what the different options might be (including not doing anything)
Possible activities
- Investigate the brief from the business, feeding back and redefining if necessary, to focus on problems and not solutions
- Stakeholder mapping
- Identify user groups
- Find existing data and information about any existing comparable products and services
- Identify service owner
- Identify constraints (policy, legal, tech, etc)
- Stakeholder interviews
Possible outputs
- Problem statement and context
- User stories
- As-is journey/service map
- As-is technical map/dependencies
- Pain points from the as-is journey map
Responsibility and timescale
Responsibility – The Digital Service will work with service owners and other stakeholders to gather all the initial information to scope out the work during the discovery phase. Although we are very experienced in what is needed to build a great website, we will welcome your point of view and thoughts.
Timescale – Dependent on scale