DESIGN THINKER PODCAST

Ep#31: Reducing the Risk of Innovation with Discovery

• Dr. Dani Chesson and Designer Peter Allan • Episode 31

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What is discovery work? How does it help reduce risk and deliver better outcomes? In this episode, Dr Dani and Designer Peter dive into the "how-to" of discovery work to explain what it is, why it is important, and tips on how to get started. 

In this episode, you will 
• discover the importance of discovery work 
• learn how to get started with discovery
• hear stories of how discovery work has influenced the outcome of projects


Dr Dani:

Welcome to the Design Thinker podcast, where we explore the theory and practice of design, hosted by me, dani, and.

Designer Peter:

Peter.

Dr Dani:

Hey Pete.

Designer Peter:

Morning Dani. How are you?

Dr Dani:

Good, how are you Good? How are you?

Designer Peter:

I'm fair thanks, Well done for finding the record button there.

Dr Dani:

You'd think that we'd do this every week and just be able to just jump into it. So what are we talking about today?

Designer Peter:

Today we are going to talk about discovery.

Dr Dani:

As in discovery work.

Designer Peter:

As in okay, if you do. If we must narrow it down, yes, discovery work in design. Let's narrow it down slightly further.

Dr Dani:

Well, let's start with a broader definition and then, we can bring it back to design.

Designer Peter:

Okay, cool.

Dr Dani:

So shall we start by defining. What does discovery mean?

Designer Peter:

Let's definitely do that. Google's doing a bad job for me today. It's bringing me back to Discovery Channel.

Dr Dani:

Okay, I've got something. Okay, the act or process of seeing, finding or gaining knowledge of something previously unknown.

Designer Peter:

Perfect. It goes all the way back to Latin. There's two Latin words joined together. This, the original Latin word, is co operere, co-operere, operere. It was cover completely, and then that led to late Latin and old French Decovere, and combined with English cover, and then it led to discover Make, known from the Middle English. There we go, that's from the Oxford Languages Dictionary. There's a couple of deeper definitions here. Fine, what one is fined unexpectedly or during a search. The example there is maybe less relevant to our conversation, but it's firemen discovered a body in the debris or become aware of um a fact or situation, show interest in an activity for the first time, be the first to recognize the potential, an actor or performer. And then the the archaic and older definitions are to divulge a secret or disclose the identity of, or display a quality or feeling.

Dr Dani:

Yeah, wow, lots to go out there want to touch on this idea of surprise finding in design work. We are purposeful in our discovery work. However, we do find some things that we don't expect to find, which is why we do the discovery work right Definitely, but I think we do in design work. We have to be intentional about doing discovery work, because if we're not intentional about the discovery work, it won't happen and we can't rely on just spontaneously finding things out right yeah, intentional, deliberate.

Designer Peter:

Yes, nice reminder, especially when it comes to I guess the word that comes to mind is selling, but explaining, selling it's probably maybe the right in an organization or to the people you're working with. That, yes, we do, we should, we definitely should. We need to spend some time doing doing discovery, and it's not a something we want to skip. So we've got our dictionary definition in terms of can we narrow down to discovery work and design? Now do you think, yeah, describe what's some more detail around, what it is in?

Dr Dani:

discovery work and design. Uncovering is is definitely a good word to describe it, because we're trying to uncover what's really happening. I like to describe it as a process of like peeling back the onion. Yeah, where, whatever our environment is like, wherever we work, the team that we are on, we all have that like knowledge, the things that we know on the surface, discovery work is actually going in. Okay, that's the top layer, but what's happening underneath that and what's happening underneath that and what's happening underneath that, doing that in a very empathetic and humanized way. So it's not me just sitting there going. Why do you do that? Why? Why it's not? You're not interrogating somebody, but you're trying to find out about situation. And, more specifically, it's not you're not interrogating somebody, but you're trying to find out about situation. And, more specifically, it's when we do discovery work. There's three things we're looking for.

Designer Peter:

Right, it's needs, wants and pain points yes, definitely that, and maybe what I'm about to say is covered by that. But I do think of like. For me, discovery is this, uh, like starting. Discovery is just this exciting kind of departure point where you go off on an expedition to explore something gene lidka and tim ogilvie's um designing for growth books or and kind of framework. You know the four questions of what is what, if what, uh, wows and and what works. Yeah, discovery is all about for me is discovering what. What is, what is the current situation, what is happening right now. Maybe that includes what has happened in the past. I'm just thinking out here, so that, ultimately, where, what is happening right now and what are we discovering about the human needs, wants, pain points, what else? I feel like, yeah, discovery for me is definitely discovering those needs, wants, pain points, but also discovering maybe more about why those needs and wants and pain points exist.

Dr Dani:

So while we're looking for needs, wants and pain points, there's things that surround that right.

Designer Peter:

Yeah.

Dr Dani:

It's like the emotion, the experience.

Designer Peter:

Yeah.

Dr Dani:

What is somebody actually trying to achieve? What are their hopes? What are their fears? So it's all of that, which is why discovery work is often done in a very qualitative way, because we're trying to understand the human experience around something. For example, let's say we wanted to understand. We put out this amazing product and nobody's buying it. What we want to find out is why are people not buying it? But in the discovery work, what we have to find out is what do people actually need, so that we can link it back to what we've put out to see if it's meeting any needs. Now, I'm describing it this way because the way it should happen is you should do the discovery work and then create the product. But we both know that in organizations, we create things and then go try to find a problem for it. Yeah, while that is not the way to do it I don't recommend doing it that way we do find ourselves in those situations and we can still use discovery work to back into that.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, yes, maybe a less extreme version of that is we've done a little bit of discovery work. We've launched something and it's a really good idea to do more discovery work once it's launched. So the situation you're describing is slightly different, in that something's been launched without understanding whether it's even going to solve a problem. There's not a slight yeah, like you said an alternative to that, which is we've discovered a little bit, we think there's a problem, we've launched something and we should keep discovering whether that thing we've launched actually helps with a problem, or even if the problem exists I think something that gets, something that gets missed quite often is or it's a misconception that discovery work is something you do once and it's done in the beginning and that's the only time you do it.

Designer Peter:

Yeah.

Dr Dani:

That's not true. Discovery work should be continuous.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, yeah.

Dr Dani:

And there's different points in the problem-solving process that you can use discovery work.

Designer Peter:

Exactly. Again, we can fall into the trap and from the outside, until you start to learn about it and how to do it, design can seem like a linear process, but it's not quite the opposite of that, in that it's chaos, but it's definitely not a linear process and we should be open to doing different activities. It's definitely not a linear process and we should be open to doing different activities at various points of a design process. I actually you know I was going to bring this up later, but I might as well bring it up now. So I was in preparation for this episode.

Designer Peter:

I had a refresh of practical design discovery by dan brown, awesome book. I recommend it to anyone, along with the two other books he's written. But, um, he describes discovery as an attitude, which I really like. It's like okay, so that helps you lift out of. These are specific activities that I definitely need to do at this point. Or you know, I need to be thinking about doing discovery only at this time, or instead of that, you just go.

Designer Peter:

Discovery is an attitude, so I need to. Sometimes I'm in the discovery mindset or attitude and other times I need to dial that down or even switch it off altogether, because if you're in a delivery attitude, then sometimes discovery is is unhelpful. You just need to kind of commit to delivering something and then switch back into discovery. Once it's committed to is kind of delivered. Discovery is, for me, about kind of asking questions. At certain points in time it's actually not helpful to be asking questions. You need to go ahead, get something out there and then ask questions after. Does that make sense or am I sounding a bit um crazier than usual?

Dr Dani:

no, you're not even crazy there is a place for discovery and there's a place for not using discovery work. It's the same way that I talk about. You know, we love to talk about things as this or that.

Dr Dani:

And it's it's, it's what, what is the appropriate thing to use in this moment? So, like creative thinking and analytical thinking, they're both important, like we need people that can. We need highly analytical minds and we need highly creative minds. The history is that we've preferred one over the other. I think we're learning now that actually both are important and both have a place. There is a place where you have to be super, super creative and get those ideas, and then there's a time to be analytical and go OK, how do I make this work? Does this work? Is this viable Doing all of that work? So those two things need to work hand in hand. And it's the same with discovery. If you're in the middle of building a product and it's like the last leg of getting something built, then you can't go. Well, we need to go do discovery work.

Designer Peter:

Yeah or hey. I've just, you know, that bit of discovery that was on the back burner. It's just been finished and, guess what, you know, it's going to change our whole idea about a particular. You know, maybe it's just a feature of a product that's about to be launched.

Dr Dani:

Yeah, I think In that situation, what I would do is I would say, okay, well, if we know this is not going to work, we can front foot that right. We can start talking to customers and showing them what's being built and saying, look, this is something we've started the design on, we want and it's going to launch our next day. We know it's not going to meet everybody's needs, so we're trying to get some ideas of how do we improve it beyond when it's initially launched. And if you frame it that way, you can still do the discovery work, still get the launch done. You don't have to stop everything.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, yeah, totally agree with that. And, and especially the, the transparency, I think, around the customers or users, whether they're, you know, external customers or team members in your organization. We, as humans, we dislike uncertainty. We're wired to avoid uncertainty and seek certainties. The more clarity and certainty you can give the people who are going to be using your product about. We know this isn't quite what it could be, but here is how we're going to be improving it over time. I think that version is just, you know, a factor of 10 more preferable to delivering something to people and not telling them that we're still discovering its usefulness or usability or how. Yeah, well, we've kind of, um, not surprisingly gone meandering around um clearly a topic about this is unplanned, um, uh.

Designer Peter:

But actually one of the ways I love to do discovery is by doing almost a full kind of design cycle within a discovery. You know, like a miniature, low risk, low cost, um, let's go out and um, do some research, let's some ideate, let's, and then prototype and test and then come back and that low cost, quick design cycle tells us, you know, what we should actually be going out to discover, if that that makes sense. So you start off with a kind of broad, almost arbitrary design challenge and then come back again. We've almost done that in our podcast, haven't we? We had a quick canter through a definition of what it is, why it's important, maybe a little bit how to do it. So let's get into the actual conversation.

Dr Dani:

Before we do that, I do want to point something out, though. Yeah, the reason that you kind of go out and meander and then come back in it does a couple of things. One it helps kind of clear out the cobwebs in the brain yeah and it also gets your brain in that mode of what it's about to do.

Designer Peter:

So it's almost, it's like a priming activity priming, love it, yeah, yeah okay, now let's get to the conversation oh, I was gonna keep going and I'll add one more thing. So cobwebs the word I I think of is fog, and often, you know as a design thinking facilitator we get comfortable with helping other people, be comfortable with stepping into the fog. I think that's inevitable. You have a bit of a guiding question to start you off, but almost immediately discover you're stepping in. Well, this is a metaphor. Obviously You're stepping into the fog of we don't know where we're going and we don't know where we're going to end up. It's guaranteed we'll come out of the fog and we'll be more knowledgeable at the end of it. Okay, over to you, let, and we'll be more knowledgeable at the end of it, okay over to you.

Dr Dani:

Let's get us back on track. Okay, so I think we need to recap the definition of what is discovery.

Designer Peter:

Yeah.

Dr Dani:

So what's discovery work in design? We said it's a process of uncovering, with the purpose of understanding, the lived experiences of people that are going to be using the solution that we're creating or the service we're creating, and what we're trying to understand specifically is needs, wants and pain points around their lived experience.

Designer Peter:

Discovery starts with a question, maybe a big question or a design challenge of some sort. That's our starting point, and then we embark on our discovery.

Dr Dani:

Yes, so that's the what. So we usually then go to the why. So why do we do discovery work?

Designer Peter:

because we don't know the answer to the question we just asked ourselves, as in the design challenge more often than not, we think we know, okay, I don't know.

Dr Dani:

that most of us are humble enough to go you know, i't know. It takes a lot of experience and a lot of vulnerability to go, and I think this is why design work and discovery work particularly don't happen is that we believe that we have to know all the answers and even when we're in situations where we think we don't know something, we'll pretend to not to know it, because it's a vulnerable place to be and it takes a lot of vulnerable maturity or a lot. It takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable to say I don't know, let's go find out, let's ask people organizations and businesses.

Designer Peter:

It's less. It's uncommon to to to have the courage to say I don't know. Discovery yeah. So for me a discovery is. It's almost a helpful framework that can encourage that courage, encourage people to be courageous. It's kind of providing pathway to make it okay for for us all, a group of people, to go exploring, to acknowledge or bring to the surface the fact that we don't know.

Dr Dani:

Let's imagine we are creating an app, a budgeting app, to help people get their finances in order, and you and I now magically have the skills you need to make an app, and we go, okay, right, we're going to go create this thing and we create it. And we create it based on your life experience and my life experience, which, to some degree, is pretty homogenous but we're creating something for people that need help understanding their finances, that maybe haven't done a budget, that maybe doesn't even know how to download an app. Yet we probably have different life experiences than the people that we're targeting for this app, and so we're creating it in a way that maybe isn't resonating with them. We don't know like well, why doesn't everybody have an app that they use for budgeting? We don't even know that.

Dr Dani:

Or is it even a need? Do people even need an app to do their project? Maybe people like using a spreadsheet, maybe people just like doing it on a post-it note. So there's all of these things that we don't know, but we've decided, hey, this seems like a good idea, let's go do it Now. We've spent time, money, energy all of which we could have been actually doing something useful creating this thing, and then we're wondering well, why does no one want it?

Designer Peter:

All we've done is the old me search, assumed or chosen to forget about the rest of the human population.

Dr Dani:

The counter argument to that is well, what if you are creating something for people like you and me? I've only lived one life, you've only lived one life, even though we're very similar yeah we have a lot of attributes in common yeah we also are very different, like where you grew up and where I grew up is very different. Yeah, you have siblings, I don't. You have children, I don't like.

Designer Peter:

There's still these very different things that changes your, your view and experience, in your needs and wants yeah, pausing only because I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't think that discovery is a good idea or doesn't want to do discovery. And it's pretty challenging for me if we're, if we were to kind of rewind or go back in time where we've, instead of hypothetically designing, launching this budgeting tool without um, you know, taking the time for discovery, and you know we've we've launched it, we've um. We're starting to realize is that people don't use it, and so either we go back in time and go right, so how might we understand more about whether people need a budgeting app, or? Or we um, or let's pretend we've launched it and we've just realized that we should have done some design, discovery or discovered more. What should? What would we do? How do we give ourselves a chance of version two of our app actually being used by more people?

Dr Dani:

In my experience, most of the discovery work I do is in that situation. We've started something, we've done done something. It's not working. Why is it not working? Well, who'd you speak to? Yeah, crickets. Yeah, another example some years ago, I was doing some work amazing initiative, amazing program. They were gonna enable wi-fi in in remote places as part of, like you know, we need to upgrade the digital infrastructure so there's equitable access to internet. Well, these people go out to these places. So somebody made this decision, probably from their computer, got this all together again. Hearts in the right place, great intentions. They go out there to do this work. The physical work of this and people that are like this is great, but you know, we don't have electricity, like most of us out here live on generators. So now think about all of the planning, the, the effort, the funding, the energy, the time that went into that, only to find out actually we've got a bigger problem to solve before we can solve this problem.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, there was a few people going in for me. We'd gone exploring, or at least gone to where the people were hoping to use our product, and actually we would have realized we would have discovered the bigger problem to solve or the first problem to solve.

Dr Dani:

yeah, going back to the budgeting app, what if it is that people like I'm so in debt I don't even budget because everything I make goes out the door. So, yeah, talking to me about budgeting means nothing to me. Right, like we have to understand what is it that people need and want? Yeah, so that we can meet their needs yeah, yeah, exactly you're not making the sales yeah, or or um.

Designer Peter:

I do do a budget at the moment, but it's um, not on a phone because or a computer, because my budget doesn't allow me to have a phone. Yeah, which is definitely possible.

Dr Dani:

The why of discovery work. There's a couple of whys. One is to make sure that the work that we're doing is actually going to have some impact. The work that we're doing is actually going to deliver some value. It's going to make an impact.

Designer Peter:

Doing is actually going to deliver some value. It's going to make an impact. It's going to deliver value. I think there's. I mean, we're just talking about talking specifically about design discovery or discovery as part of design work. For me, though, it's just as important. When you say value and impact, it's like, or we do want to make an impact, or make an impact on people's lives, and, you know, discover the, the needs and wants and the pain points so we can resolve those. But the other side of the equation is the business need, so let's discover. Discovery is also about, you know, discovering what is the business problem or what is the business opportunity. I don't know if that helped you find your third, why that you were looking for the third one is it helps reduce risk in what we're doing.

Dr Dani:

yeah, when we do the risk discovery work, when we do the discovery work, yeah, what we're doing is when we go to do something new, let's say we're going to go improve a product yeah we can spend a lot of money and time on things that don't matter and then that money that we spend on it becomes a big waste.

Dr Dani:

When we do the discovery work, we reduce the possibilities of what we can be working on and really get an understanding of this is what people need, want and likely going to be willing to pay for. Willing to pay for yeah. So we're helping reduce the risk of doing of innovation, of improvement, of change all of those things that you know to be a viable organization we need to be doing.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, reducing risk. What was it? Come back to the first two. Whys where?

Dr Dani:

Making sure what we do has value.

Designer Peter:

Value yeah.

Dr Dani:

Adds value. Adds value Makes an impact.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, reduces, that's value makes an impact, reduces risk and can I tweak at least one of those slightly this, like, makes a positive impact yes I like that and I think you can have an impact, and it's not the impact you want and it can you know. Yeah, I guess, reducing the risk both of, let's just say, business failure and but also reducing the risk, I think, think of unintended consequences, which kind of links to the making an impact, a positive impact, okay, yeah, Great.

Dr Dani:

Okay. Now the part I know that you're itching to get into is the how. Oh yeah.

Designer Peter:

Okay, how do we do discovery? Well, as I said before jumping on on, maybe I think we start with a question, maybe start with one big question. It's kind of like the goal, or maybe it's the questions in the goldilocks zone of it's not too big, not too small, shouldn't give us a specific solution, but invites us to go exploring on. What is this problem or design challenge? We're gonna try and uh, or we're going to go and discover whether it is a problem or not.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, and as I said, uh, my, I really like, I really enjoy, um, doing a short piece of, uh, full cycle design, kickoff, discovery. Um, let's say, I don't know to put it give it a bit of a time frame. Let's say I know we've got three months to design something and maybe we've allocated I know four or five, six weeks of that. For for discovery instinct would be to spend the first week of that just almost knee-jerk. Take the design challenge and just go and discover, just just don't, almost don't plan anything, just go and improvise a design sprint and see what you can find. It's kind of. There's a few different reasons for that. One is just get momentum going, overcome kind of inertia, overcome the temptation to kind of focus on desk research and, yeah, just have a bias towards action, get going and then, at the end of the end of that initial sprint, if you like, you'll have a much clearer idea of what the what the actual design challenge is and where the discovery effort should be or could be focused.

Dr Dani:

So I agree with you. I think the starting point is the question. One of my favorite resources for this is I don't know if you're familiar with this, but A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. So my top tips for, like, how do you formulate a good discovery question to your point it can't be too big, it can't be too narrow, so it's got to be right in the middle.

Dr Dani:

The other piece is it cannot be a leading question. So you need to make sure that your question is very neutral, and what I mean by that is you can't have something positive leaning or negative leaning, like you can't say, well, tell me about all the bad experiences you've had, because maybe then I'm kind of leading them. So a more neutral question would be tell me about your experience with whatever right. That's just an example. If we were doing this in real life I'd put a lot more thought and effort into it. So it cannot be leading. And then the third thing is the question cannot be one that can be answered with a yes or no. Those are like your three little getting started with creating a discovery question thing, yeah, okay.

Dr Dani:

So you have your question. Then I like to think about doing. Discovery work is happening in concentric circles, meaning you take that question and you take it to a few people and a little bit of discovery work. That first group I like to call the friendlies. Okay, so these are people that maybe you've had other conversations with, maybe they've been part of discovery work before you friends, family, I don't know. You find some friendlies and and you test the question. It's this is still valuable work because you're still collecting information. It's just that you're doing a little bit of a test run, because what you don't want to do is you don't want to go and then talk to 50 people and while you're doing that you're like crap, I'm asking the wrong question yeah or you know, I've set this up to be a big disaster, whereas if you do that with you know three to five people, you can recover much quicker.

Dr Dani:

Yeah, and then, once you've done that and you have some insights, then you go okay, does this question really make sense or do I need to reframe it? Do I need to think about it a little bit differently? What are some follow-up questions I can ask um, because the idea of one question is amazing, but some people need a little bit of prodding to get them to really open up. Yeah, so, and that initial friendlies, discovery work will help you flush that out a little bit? Yeah, the reason I also recommend that approach is that it cuts out the fear of doing the discovery work yeah, yeah, and that kind of um aligns.

Designer Peter:

It's the same thing that I was talking about getting going with a short, sharp kind of cycle, if you like. It's the same thing. It's like, yeah, and also, you know, you're you're kind of adding some great detail here which is, yeah, try that, do that on, on a right on your doorstep I think. If it is like don't just so friendly and uh, yeah, so for me it's all about just getting going to. It's like feel the fear and do it, and the smaller and shorter an activity is, then perhaps it's easier to kind of overcome that fear and just get going. Yeah, and then, on the other side of that minor fear, you've got in that initial discovery sprint. You're then equipped with more information and the fog is maybe clearing slightly, and that helps either overcome the fear of getting started, because you don't have a metaphorical blank page anymore, or you've got enough clarity to help you keep going through any concerns that you've got.

Dr Dani:

And it gives you a moment to reflect on what you're doing and adjust, yeah, so once you've done that initial bit and you've readjusted, then you can make that circle bigger, right? Then you go. Okay, I'm going to now go talk to 10 people.

Designer Peter:

Yeah.

Dr Dani:

And then you do that, and then you kind of go through and go, okay, what am I hearing, what am I learning? Am I still asking the right questions? And then you readjust.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, what we're seeing here is take an iterative approach to discovery rather than a linear approach. Yeah, even you know, I think the double diamond is a great model, and you know cycles are a great model. Somehow combining the two together, I think, is the most powerful thing.

Dr Dani:

So, within the double diamond, you're kind of cycling and iterating and outwards and back inwards all the time actually, yeah, another question that I always get when we get into the how is well, how many people do we need to talk to? And that's a really hard one to answer and you know I'll be vulnerable here and say I don't know. In qualitative research we know that you need to talk to about 20 people before you reach what's called theoretical saturation, and that's when you start hearing the same thing over and over and over again. Statistically, when you get to about 20 people that you're talking to about something, that's the number.

Designer Peter:

Okay, what was the term?

Dr Dani:

Theoretical saturation Theoretical saturation.

Designer Peter:

Okay, that's the number. Okay, what was the term? Theoretical saturation? Theoretical saturation okay.

Dr Dani:

So 20 is the number. That in qualitative research, that standard. However, discovery work, while it is a form of qualitative research, it's a little bit different and there's lots of different factors that influence how many people you speak to. One is if you're looking to do something completely brand new, you're going to have to do more discovery work. For example, when we moved from when the world was moving to mobile banking, the discovery work around mobile banking was massive because it was a brand new thing.

Dr Dani:

If it's something that people are familiar with, if it's improvement work, that number might be different. If you know, like, let's say, you make a product that is for expecting moms, your discovery work might be a little bit smaller because there's like a very specific target customer for that, whereas if you're designing a banking app is probably more discovery work because the audience, the customer base for banking is massive. Now let's say that you have a banking app, but what you're working on is getting older people to adopt a banking app, your discovery might be smaller because you're focusing on a specific age group. So there's lots of factors that go into. So you really have to sit down and go what are the attributes of the people I need to speak to and then making sure that you're getting a good cross-section, depending on the thing that you're working on yeah, and does it also part of it determined by?

Designer Peter:

because we talked about discovery helps reduce risk and for me, part of it is well, how much do you want to reduce your risk by? I mean, nothing is ever 100% knowable, but if you do no discovery, then you know there's a high risk of complete failure. The more discovery you do, then I imagine there's some. You know there's a correlation between discovery and reduction in in risk. Yeah, so you know, if you're comfortable with, or or you're, you're actually wanting to take on a high amount of risk, then you don't need to. You might not need to or want to do as much discovery. So you know that I think, and I think banking is pretty risky to begin with. So therefore, lots of discovery needed to truly understand what people's personal appetites were and how it might work, etc. Etc.

Dr Dani:

Another thing to think about, though, is and I go back to the banking app one a lot of that discovery work didn't just help understand what do we need to create. It also helped understand when we launch this. How do we help people adopt it?

Designer Peter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That reminds me of a simple, when I'm doing discovery, because that's about adoption. Isn't it about people's current habits and behaviors and how they might need to change in order for something that everybody knows is preferable and they want to do it, to adopt it? It means creating new habits, letting go of old ones.

Dr Dani:

So, for example, one of the things that banks did when online banking became a thing is when you went to the bank to do a transaction, they'd go hey, do you want me to show you how to set your account up?

Designer Peter:

online yeah.

Dr Dani:

And they would sit with you and show you how to do that. Yeah, the reason they knew they needed to do that is from discovery work.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, ah, yes, the mental. So yeah, exactly, and I think that's why, for me, discovery work um so three or four piece definitely like be curious and discover things about people and the person first, then the problem or their problems, and then and maybe start to get into well, what about our product or our process that we are creating is?

Dr Dani:

for me, it's always in the orders, like like people, person first, then problems and then that one, yeah, and the reason that's important is because and you're absolutely right we can't just show up somewhere and start talking to people about this product Because, believe it or not, while we think the thing that we are working on is the most important thing in the world, and it is to us because we're working on it For everybody else, that's like the least of you know. They're not just sitting around waiting to talk to you about this thing. Yeah, the reason we do when we do discovery work, we try to understand the person, then the problem and then the product is because we need to understand the context in which the thing that we, the product, is going to be used. How is this, in the context of our customer, going to help them?

Dr Dani:

So I love to go back to the Apple commercials, because I think they do a brilliant job of this. Like I remember, when Siri, the technology on the iPhone came out, the commercials were there was this one commercial about somebody in the kitchen baking and they're like hey, siri, can you set a timer for? Yeah, it wasn't about the freaking product. Yeah, it was about. This is how this is going to work in your life yeah, yeah, yeah, perfect, great example.

Designer Peter:

So this onion or the, the concentric circle. So we're kind of iterating, we're spiraling outwards, and then discovery. I guess it fundamentally for me it usually involves getting out of whatever building you're working on or wherever your current kind of work environment is, and going and exploring and understanding the environment, the context um of the, the people you think have the problem that you think you might be able to help them with. And you know we talked about asking people questions. I think we're also, yeah, observing. We're really trying to build up as full a picture as possible of what is actually happening.

Dr Dani:

Where appropriate and where we can, we should be doing discovery work in the context of where people are. That's not always possible and it's also not always appropriate, right Like, let's say, you're doing research for a medical lab. It's probably not. It's not appropriate for you to go sit in doctor's office when somebody's having their exam, like that.

Dr Dani:

So, we do have boundaries, but where possible we should. And even if you can't do the discovery work there, try to go visit those spaces, not in a engaging with people kind of way, but so that you can go, so like if you're doing work in, like you know, for a retail store, go visit the store. It might not be practical to do discovery work in the store, but you can go visit the store to get a sense of like. If I was a customer here, this is what it feels like when I walk in. This is what it feels like, you know, when I'm trying to find a product Like be a customer yeah, like, yeah, exactly, and likewise.

Designer Peter:

Um. Maybe not appropriate to um sit in on someone else's um you know medical consultation, but perhaps there's a reason for you to have one. That again a version of of me search. But I think it's some really a valid thing to um to go and do that, to go and experience the thing that that you're trying to understand for yourself yeah, some years ago I was doing a piece of work for teachers and I asked if classrooms weren't being used.

Dr Dani:

Could I go visit some classrooms and, like you know, stand where the seat sheet like, just because I don't know.

Designer Peter:

That's not my work environment go and do the job that uh, you're uh, you're trying to help love it. And I feel like this could go on to multiple episodes about discovery danny. Uh, we kind of only just started on it, but, um, what's next on our in our conversation? So we've covered off the what is it and and why it's important and the how.

Dr Dani:

Yeah, just to wrap up the how, the one thing I'll say is you have to figure out when it's appropriate to do discovery work, when it's not, because it won't always be appropriate.

Dr Dani:

And then you have to be very practical, pragmatic around the scale of how much discovery work you do. There is the risk that you get stuck in perpetual discovery and then you don't do anything because you're so caught up in the discovery. So you have to keep those boundaries in mind and kind of go, enough is enough, you're never going to know anything. Like you said earlier, you're never going to know anything to the fullest extent it can be known.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. That's a great reminder. Actually there's this, almost there's this kind of space for discovery. At one end, uh, at the extreme, there's no discovery at all, and then the other end of the extreme there's just too much and you're like you're stuck in discovery and that they're both pitfalls to avoid here so I think the last part of this is um the design thinking capabilities that show up here.

Designer Peter:

Yeah, definitely that empathetic exploring obviously comes to the fore when we're in discovery mode. Situation optimizing kicks discovery off because you have to go. I know there's something in this and I think I can see that. I think there's a problem or an opportunity here and I believe that you can almost imagine you know, you know the improvements that you could potentially make, and there's definitely something in this collective collaboration as well. I think discovery, like most of design, is a team sport. You know, taking people. I think it's more helpful to take stakeholders, smes people are going to be creating the solution developers if it's a digital product, take those people on at least part of the discovery journey with you. Meet customers, meet users, spend time observing what's actually happening.

Designer Peter:

I had a great story from a colleague around an initial version of an app. It was an app designed for people working in a supermarket doing stock, to take goods and products from the storeroom into the supermarket after hours, so like in the middle of the night, and the initial version of this app was designed, you know, kind of without a great deal of discovery. It seems obvious, because the first version was designed in such a way that you couldn't actually see it in the dark of the storeroom. And then, when they took developers along to do some additional discovery and realised that the app was going to be used both in a really dark space and a bright space, then they redesigned it to enable it to switch from one mode to another. Um, so yeah, I think collective collaboration. I mean they all come into play all the time, but those are the ones that jump out for me.

Dr Dani:

How about you.

Dr Dani:

A great empathetic exploration is key, because we, you know, while we're out doing this discovery work, we have to do it in a way that we don't create harm, we don't make people uncomfortable, we don't traumatize people.

Dr Dani:

So all of those things are really, really important. And then situation optimizing, for all of the things that you said and what happens sometimes, depending on the thing that we are doing discovery work on, we are going to discover a lot. We're going to hear a lot of negative things and a lot of hard things, and being able to. So this is where situation optimizing comes into place, because you still have to make sure that you are able to go okay, this is really bad. However, we can make this better, like maintaining that view, like, okay, these are all the things that are wrong, these are all the constraints we have to work with and with bringing them in to help plan the discovery work, particularly if it's an audience that you are not familiar with. So if I was going to go do research with new moms, I would want to find a few new moms to bring into the fold to help me plan that, because I have no clue.

Dr Dani:

So I think those three again, they're all important, but I think those three are the most important.

Dr Dani:

The last thing I'll say that we didn't touch on and, like you said, this could be a forever episode is discovery Work is not the time to solution. Yeah, when you are doing discovery work and someone says something to you, don't go into this, go into this into solutioning. Equally, when somebody says something to you, don't defend what defends your position about that. So if somebody says, you know, I hate this part of the app, that's not your opportunity to explain why the app was designed that way. That's your opportunity to say tell me more about that, be curious, don't get furious oh, be curious, don't get furious all right.

Dr Dani:

I think it brings us to our last bit, which is um. What is your takeaway?

Designer Peter:

takeaway? Yeah, I'm definitely gonna check out a more beautiful question by warren berger and that's a bit of a good recommendation there and see what else am I going to take away from this? Um, your concentric circles. I kind of take away that combining that concentric circles with the? Um, that iteration and I talked about and combining those two together. Yeah, it's all about just getting going and just with just enough information, just enough structure to, yeah, get through that fear of the blank page that we all get in the beginning of something. How about you, dani? What's so? Have you got any takeaways?

Dr Dani:

My takeaway is your analogy of using Goldilocks as an analogy to explain the size of the question.

Designer Peter:

Ah, okay.

Dr Dani:

I have been looking for how to explain that in a way that would click with people, because it's a hard thing to go. It can't be this, it can't be that. So I am going to use that analogy to frame up, and I can kind of see a nice visual around that too. Okay, having a big question and a little question, but we want a midsize question.

Designer Peter:

Just right question yeah.

Dr Dani:

Cool, thank you.

Designer Peter:

You're welcome. Mid-sized question, just right question. Yeah, yeah, so, thank you, hi, welcome. Great to hear. It's always uh nice to hear something I said is useful to someone else and uh, yeah, thank you for yours you say lots of things that are useful, peter I do, I know good, it's nice.

Dr Dani:

No thanks, thanks all right, I think that does it for us for this episode okay, thanks everyone for listening yeah, thank you.

Designer Peter:

Thanks for chatting, danny, um and uh. Speak to you next time.