3.1 Discover
This is where you learn about your community and the problem you're trying to solve. You'll do research to understand people's needs, how the community works, and what's already out there.
Stay open-minded during this phase. Your goal is to learn, not to jump to solutions right away.
tip
Include your team and community members in the research. It helps everyone understand the problem better.
Key activities:
- User research
- Conduct interviews, surveys, and observations with diverse community members
- Create user personas and journey maps to visualize user experiences
- Identify pain points and opportunities in current processes or systems
- Stakeholder mapping
- Identify and engage with key stakeholders, including government offices, community organizations, and local businesses
- Understand their perspectives, needs, and potential contributions to the project
- Problem exploration
- Define the scope of the challenge you're addressing
- Investigate root causes and systemic factors contributing to the problem
- Research existing solutions and their effectiveness
- Data gathering and analysis
- Collect and analyze relevant data from various sources
- Identify trends, patterns, and insights that inform your understanding
- Context mapping
- Understand the broader ecosystem, including policy landscape, technological infrastructure, and community dynamics
- Identify potential barriers and enablers for your project
- Opportunity identification
- Synthesize your research to identify key opportunity areas
- Generate initial ideas for potential solutions