Plan

Planning transforms your research insights into actionable decisions. 

plan illustration

Discover | Plan | Build | Validate | Iterate

Planning transforms your research insights into actionable decisions. This phase is where you define what you’re building, organize how it should work, and create a user-focused strategy before any development begins.

Good planning prevents costly changes later and ensures your team builds something that truly serves your users’ needs. It’s the bridge between understanding your users and creating solutions for them.

Think of planning like creating a blueprint for a building—you need clear specifications and structure before construction starts, or you risk building something that doesn’t work for the people who will use it.

By taking time to plan thoughtfully, you can:

  • Create clear project boundaries that keep teams focused
  • Organize content and features in ways users expect
  • Validate your approach before investing in development

Usability Consulting and Research

ITS offers UI, web, and app consultations to help Yale departments enhance user experience, accessibility, and meet Yale standards.

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Who are you building for?

Your Discovery research identified your users—now it’s time to keep them at the center of every planning decision. Avoid the temptation to prioritize what’s convenient for your organization over what users actually need.

Don’t start planning from scratch—refer back to your user research, personas, and insights from the Discovery phase. These findings should directly inform your scope decisions, structural choices, and feature priorities. If you find yourself making planning decisions without considering your Discovery insights, pause and reconnect with what you learned about your users.

When deciding what to include, how to organize content, or which features to prioritize, always ask: “Does this help users accomplish their goals?” Your users’ tasks and priorities should be the primary filter for all planning choices. If a feature or content area doesn’t clearly support user needs, question whether it belongs in this phase of the project.

Look for creative solutions that serve both users and the organization, rather than forcing one to win over the other. Often conflicts arise from assumptions—test whether the organizational goal actually requires compromising user experience. When true conflicts exist, focus on user needs for core functionality while finding less intrusive ways to meet organizational requirements.

magnifying user
scope

Define the Scope

Defining scope means setting clear boundaries for what you will and won’t include in your project. Without clear scope, projects expand endlessly, budgets balloon, and teams lose focus on what matters most to users.

Good scoping starts with your Discovery insights about user priorities. What features and content do users actually need to accomplish their goals? What would be nice-to-have but isn’t essential? Scope helps you focus resources on the highest-impact work.

This phase creates project goals, success metrics, feature lists, and clear statements about what’s excluded. Everyone on your team should understand exactly what you’re building and why.

How to define and prioritize your project scope
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Establish Structure & Findability

Structure is about organizing your content and features so users can easily find what they need. Even the best content becomes useless if people can’t locate it or understand how to navigate to their goals.

Good structure matches how users think about your content, not how your organization is internally organized. It creates logical pathways that feel intuitive and reduces the mental effort required to use your site or application.

During this phase, you’ll create site maps, navigation systems, and content organization that directly supports user tasks. You’ll also consider search and filtering options that help users when browsing isn’t enough.

How to create user-focused information architecture
engage users early

Engage Users Early

Early user engagement means getting feedback from real users while you’re still in the planning phase, before significant resources are spent on development. It’s much easier and cheaper to change your plans than to rebuild something that doesn’t work.

This isn’t about asking users what they want—it’s about testing whether your planned approach actually helps them accomplish their goals. Through methods like card sorting, concept testing, and prototype feedback, you can catch problems when they’re easy to fix.

Early engagement validates that your structure makes sense to users, your scope addresses their priorities, and your overall approach aligns with how they think about their tasks.

How to test concepts and gather early feedback

Remember: Planning keeps your Discovery insights at the center of every decision. When organizational preferences conflict with user needs, good planning helps you find solutions that serve both.

Moving to Building

In this phase, you build wireframes, prototypes, and documentation to help dev teams realize your user-centered vision.

UX in the Build Phase