Discovery and user research

Every successful web application, website, and digital platform is built on the foundation of a deep, empathetic understanding of the people it serves. Without this, even the best-funded projects are guided by internal assumptions instead of real-world evidence. This often leads to confusing navigation, irrelevant features, and a major investment that fails to deliver a meaningful return.

Our Discovery and User Research process eliminates that risk by replacing guesswork with empiricism. We engage directly with your users to build an evidence-based strategy that aligns stakeholders and ensures every decision is grounded in their actual needs. This allows us to build tools that speaks their language, solves their problems, and provides you with the confidence of knowing you’ve made the right investment—one that accelerates adoption, prevents costly rework, and delivers a measurable impact.

Without discovery and research, decisions are based on assumptions that can lead to misaligned priorities, scope creep, and costly rework. This phase ensures your investment is guided by evidence, uncovering exactly what users need and how those needs intersect with your organization’s goals. The result is a digital product that delivers measurable results.

Engaging real users reveals how they think, what they expect, and where they encounter friction. This insight allows you to design navigation, content, and functionality that match real-world behaviors, reducing support requests, improving adoption, and increasing overall satisfaction.

We tailor methods to your project’s needs. Common approaches include stakeholder interviews, card sorting, usability testing, content audits, analytics review, and surveys. Each method uncovers a different dimension of insight, from strategic priorities to hands-on usability improvements. Our team is Nielsen Norman Group and Google UX certified.

Discovery identifies potential issues before they become expensive problems. By validating assumptions early, you avoid investing in features users won’t use, content they can’t find, or navigation they don’t understand.

This reduces the likelihood of post-launch redesigns and preserves both budget and timeline.

Not typically. A focused discovery phase accelerates the project overall by ensuring the build phase is based on clear, validated requirements. This avoids the delays and backtracking that often occur when critical insights are uncovered too late.

Our discovery process is directly tied to your organization’s business outcomes. Our process begins with collaborative workshops to document your specific objectives, strategic initiatives, KPIs, and what success looks like for your organization. A project charter then acts as our strategic filter, allowing us to translate your goals into specific research questions. For example, a business goal to “reduce support call volume” becomes a research focus on “identifying the top friction points that cause users to seek help.” The final output goes beyond summarizing feedback. We provide a set of actionable, prioritized recommendations, each explicitly linked back to your KPIs to show how a specific improvement to the user experience will directly advance your mission.

If your team has recently completed formal user research, has clear analytics data pinpointing issues, or has a well-documented history of user feedback, then a full, ground-up discovery phase may not be necessary. In these cases, we might recommend going directly to scope definition through user or job stories and McGovern’s top tasks.

However, if the problems are defined by internal consensus, long-held beliefs, or anecdotal feedback, then Discovery is the most valuable investment you can make. Its purpose is to validate those assumptions before you commit your development budget. Investing in a solution for an unverified problem is a significant risk and often proves more costly in the long run.

By involving stakeholders and users early, you create buy-in before changes are implemented. People are more likely to adopt new systems or workflows when they’ve had input into shaping them. This minimizes resistance and speeds up internal adoption.

We work with you to identify key audience segments and recruitment criteria. This ensures we gather input from the right mix of users that reflect different demographics, abilities, and technical comfort levels relevant to your site, application, or product.

Yes. We don’t see discovery as a one-time event. Many clients engage us to run periodic usability tests, review analytics, and adjust navigation or content over time. This creates a continuous improvement loop that keeps your site aligned with user needs and business goals.

The goal of discovery is to drive tangible results by aligning the project with real user needs and your business objectives. These results can be measured in two key areas:

For your audience, this leads to a more intuitive and effective experience. We measure this through metrics like higher task completion rates, increased user adoption, improved satisfaction scores, and a variety of engagement metrics on critical pages.

For your organization, the results are significant operational improvements. By designing a platform based on evidence, our clients see reduced scope creep during development, streamlined workflows for their staff, lower user support costs, and a clear, prioritized roadmap that prevents wasted resources. Ultimately, these outcomes deliver a higher return on your investment.

Conflicting feedback is an expected and often productive part of the process. Our role is to facilitate discussion and ask questions that help uncover user needs. We handle this by first ensuring everyone is aligned on the project’s core, measurable business goals. When a conflict arises, we bring the discussion back to those shared objectives and use disagreement as the basis for our research. By testing the competing ideas directly with users, we move the decision away from a subjective debate and toward an objective, data-driven conclusion that best serves the project’s goals.

We provide an expert, external perspective that is essential for high profile projects. Our team has over 20 years of industry experience, including a decade focused on large public sector and non-profit projects.

This hands-on experience is backed by formal, senior-level expertise. Our team holds certifications from the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) and Google in UX research and design, and we are Certified Professionals in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).

While your team possesses invaluable institutional knowledge, our role as an objective partner is to ensure the research process is shielded from internal bias. This ensures your investment is sound and set up for a successful, accessible, and user-focused outcome.