The Transformative Power of Discovery Phase
If you are new to mobile app development, the biggest challenge is creating apps that can stand out and beat the millions of other mobile apps in the market. How can your app stand the test of time and join the ranks of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and many more?
The discovery phase is your key to success and the first crucial step that lays the foundation for your mobile application development. It involves research and analysis, from defining the opportunity to exploring your market and recognizing your competitors. Professional discovery phase services will guide you through a structured approach to building sustainable products.
What Is the Discovery Phase?
This phase emphasizes thorough research and detailed analysis of the opportunity, market, and competition to ensure you’re on the right path before development begins. To fully grasp the entire scope of your app, you need to understand and deeply internalize your customers’ pain points so that you can shape your development goals for the project.
The discovery phase is an invaluable part of the product development cycle that app developers should not underestimate. Understanding user needs helps you determine and incorporate essential features in your app from the beginning, minimizing last-minute adjustments and reducing development costs from baseless assumptions.
Discovery Phase Goals
Generally, the two primary purposes of the discovery phase are research and discovery. This phase is an iterative process that occurs throughout the product lifecycle and leads you to:
- Defining business goals. The insights obtained from your research and analysis will provide a clear vision of what you must achieve, ensuring all team members are on the same page.
- Analyzing users and their needs. User data provides an accurate understanding of their requirements, which helps establish the project scope and requirements, including the features and functionalities that significantly impact them.
- Avoiding risks and optimizing resources. Thorough research and analysis during the initial stage can identify potential risks and constraints early on. You can determine whether the project is doable based on your budget, time, and technical resources.
Key Components of a Successful Discovery Phase
To guide the development process efficiently, focus on:
- Market and competitor research. Before holding a brainstorming session with your team, it is essential to equip yourselves with data to ensure a productive meeting. You need to know the exact opportunities presented by the market. Well-rounded research involves collecting and analyzing relevant information about users and competition to help your team generate a more focused set of ideas.
- User personas creation. Creating user personas can significantly contribute to the design and development process. Interviews, focus groups, and observations are research methods that enable you to discover who they are, their goals, and their main struggles in reaching them. Consider several personas, then shortlist them to the top 3-5 to focus on.
- User journey mapping. This method tracks the users’ journey of interacting with your product to figure out how they perceive and experience it at every stage to identify the app’s weak points and areas for improvement.
- Technical analysis and prototyping. This process visually represents your ideas and allows you to determine whether your product meets your target users’ expectations. Conducting pilot tests on your prototype can provide you insights into the problems related to the app’s interface, functionality, and overall user experience.
How the Discovery Phase Directly Improves UX
The discovery phase directs the team’s effort to analyze users’ behaviors, pain points, and environment and incorporate them into the overall user experience design. In the process, you can:
- Provide intuitive design. Your insights from the research enable you to convert them into a user-friendly app without a complicated interface and unnecessary elements.
- Eliminate user pain points. A user-centric approach can identify where users experience difficulty using the app. Whether these issues are minor or significant, prioritizing users’ needs in all design decisions can make your app more marketable and help reduce costs on unnecessary features and user interface components.
- Provide a personalized experience. Personalization and customization are not precisely the same, but both share the same objective — design the users’ interaction according to their needs.
Case Studies: The Path to Success and Examples of Failure
Investing money, time, and effort is vital to the project’s success, but you should adequately engage in discovery to ensure that you are on the right path. How well you conduct your research and planning determines the success of your project.
- Success Story: Spotify
In 2006, Spotify became an app that changed how people access music. This platform provides a user-friendly and personalized musical journey, where users can listen to a vast collection of music from different genres and curate their playlists based on their interests.
Transforming the challenges presented by the music industry into a huge opportunity paved the way for Spotify’s success. In 2006, CD sales had fallen consistently in recent years, online radio was still in its early stages, and record labels struggled to develop new ideas. These challenges drove Spotify’s developers, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, to brainstorm ideas for people to access and listen to new music and their favorite tracks. Part of their hard work was first reaching product-market fit. Then, Spotify became their new business venture.
- Unsuccessful Story: Google +
Google+ was a social networking platform designed to rival Facebook and Twitter. Although Google was an internet giant, it failed to compete in the social network market and struggled to engage many users.
The failure to take off was due to the need for more research and analysis of the market needs. With most users already connected to Facebook, what will make them sign up for another platform that offers the same thing? The complex user interface and environment discouraged users from engaging with the platform, contributing to the low engagement rate.
Building User-Centric Apps: Why Discovery Matters
The discovery phase is crucial in mobile app development, so app developers should take it seriously. Research and planning are key factors in this phase that will ensure your project’s success.
A well-executed project discovery phase leads you and your team to create a functional and viable product for your clients. They will value your effort in understanding their needs and your proactive approach to finding the best solutions.
