What is expected from an Interaction Designer in Discovery

During the discovery phase, the focus is on understanding the problem your service aims to solve along with project goals, user needs, and identifying potential design opportunities.

This gives the interaction designer the opportunity to better understand the problem space and begin identifying potential ways design could address it, things you will be expected to be involved in, include:

• developing your understanding of the problem space and where your service would sit within it
• identifying potential users and stakeholders and their needs within the service
• developing a strong understanding of users and business needs, including opportunities, pain points and balancing these to inform design decisions
• understanding constraints that may come in the form of policy, process, technology or delivery
• auditing existing processes to assess what can be reused as-is and where significant changes may be needed such as simplifying unnecessary journeys, improving accessibility, aligning with standard toolkits and guidelines
• implementing GDS service standards from the outset

What outputs are expected from an Interaction Designer in Discovery

Interaction Designer outputs should include the design artefacts appropriate to the phase and needs of the service, for example:

• understand and map out existing as-is user flow, to understand where change could have the biggest impact
• explore early design concepts and ideation
• accessibility considerations to identify accessibility risks and what ideas could improve these

It’s important to remember that the purpose of a discovery, for the whole team, is to frame the problem you intend to solve and to test the assumptions of the service intent, and the outcome recommendations of the discovery may be to not go ahead with the commissioning of the service. Not all services end up in production.

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