Alpha

Once you know enough about the problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll need to come up with potential solutions on how to solve them.

It’s a good idea to create, test and iterate low-risk solutions with users to reduce the risk of building or buying the wrong thing.

We help you do this through our Alpha service.

This often involves:

• identifying and testing your riskiest assumptions
• solving as much of the holistic problems users face as possible
• providing intuitive experiences across different channels
• making sure everyone can use your service
• preparing for building or implementing technical solutions in Beta

Our approach

Alpha projects vary depending on what our clients are trying to achieve, the environment they operate in, the needs of their users and much more.

We carry out a variety of activities with our clients during Alpha, such as:

• creating solution ideas and concepts
• prototype design
• prototype usability testing
• co-designing services with users
• empathy mapping
• designing future technical architecture
• testing technical integrations
• accessibility testing
• user research
• service design
• content design
• UI & UX design
• creating user stories

We work in true partnership with our clients to deliver the best quality Alpha projects, helping identify the best way forward for their digital products and services from Discovery.

Common outputs

At the end of Alpha our clients gain a clearer understanding of which solutions solve the problems their users face, helping inform the development or implementation work that normally follows.

Common Alpha outputs include:

• user stories for development / meeting through implementation
• empathy maps
• validated solutions hypotheses and prototypes
• future technical architecture
• user-tested UI and content
• to-be service blueprint
• ideas for data analytics setup
• Alpha report and recommendations for Beta

Many of the products and services we deliver with our clients go through GDS assessment. We proactively prepare our clients for GDS Alpha service assessments throughout the work we deliver during Alpha.