Once you have an understanding of the business opportunity you want to address, you next will need to understand in detail what your end user’s tasks and challenges are. You need a holistic view of the business roles of your application’s users, their jobs to be done, the information they need to get them done, along with their needs and wishes.
To get the relevant insights, you will need to visit your customers onsite or remotely, speak to everyone involved, and if onsite, observe users doing their daily work. You should gain a clear understanding of all the business roles involved, their typical tasks and pain points, and the sequence of activities.
The goal of the Discover phase is to gain a thorough understanding of the user’s needs, independent of any existing application or technology. In other words, which information do they need? When do they need it? What business outcomes do they need to achieve?
By the end of the Discover phase, you should know what needs to be achieved – without knowing how you want to achieve it, that is addressed in the Design phase.
For more information about user research during the Discover phase, have a look at the User Research Method Cards. The methods outlined there contain the most commonly practiced user research methods at SAP.