Looking at the Design Process through the Lens of the Scientific Method
Everybody learns the scientific method in grade school. Remember this?
The scientific method remains a technique for problem-solving both in the classroom and in the scientific field. I would know because my parents wanted me to be pre-med as I was growing up.
In fact, I interned at research labs two summers in a row when I was in high school. Yup, it’s as boring as it sounds. In fact, I never want to hear the word “western blotting” again (also, did I mention that one time I killed off an entire batch of cells because I thought the petri dish was empty and proceeded to spray it with alcohol?). Yeah, let’s not talk about that.
Anyways, my point is that I was very familiar with the scientific method growing up (a little too familiar with it, if you ask me). However, now that I’m working in UX design, despite me blocking out large chunks of my memory that have anything to do with science or research, I’ve noticed that the design process is very similar to the scientific method.
Let’s go through the steps, shall we?
1. Question
Scientific Method
In the scientific method, this is pretty straightforward. You need to start off asking a question. For instance, you can ask, “does the ability to delay gratification as a child predict chances of success later in life?”
Design Process
In the design process, this is where you’re performing user research. You’re conducting contextual interviews and observing your surroundings. You’re essentially trying to figure out “what is the question that we want to ask?”
For instance, after conducting several interviews on the topic of say, pet ownership, you realize that a big issue for pet owners is their feelings of worry and guilt when they go out and have to leave their dogs at home. Thus, through user research, you can develop the question “how might we help dog-owners deal with separation anxiety when they leave their dogs at home?”
2. Answer
Scientific Method
Now, you want to formulate a hypothesis to your original question. In this case, you hypothesize “no, the ability to delay gratification as a child does not predict chances of success later in life.” You might think that the ability to delay gratification as a child is too small of an indicator for future success.
Design Process
Similar to the scientific method, now you want to identify potential solutions (ideation phase), and eventually narrow down to one solution that you want to ultimately test. In ideation, you are essentially coming up with multiple “hypotheses.” In the prototyping phase, you have decided on one potential solution; this here is your “hypothesis,” the thing that you want to test.
Thus, for instance, in the ideation phase, you could have several ideas, including creating a dog stroller (that allows pet owners to bring their dogs with them wherever they go), or designing a certain kind of collar (that connects to a smartphone app, allowing the user to monitor their dog’s body temperature and movement). In the end, you choose one idea; this is the idea that you prototype and will ultimately test. Your prototype is the “hypothesis.”
3. Test
Scientific Method
This is the experimentation stage. This is where you actually get to see if your hypothesis is supported or not. In other words, this is where Walter Mischel gave the kids a marshmallow, and told them that if they didn’t eat that marshmallow, he would come back and give them another one. Mischel actually conducted follow-up studies and found that the kids who performed better on the marshmallow test actually performed better academically later on in life. Here, if you were conducting the experiment, your hypothesis would not be supported. You want to take note of this so that you can create a different hypothesis in the future.
Design Process
This is the user testing phase. You’ve designed your prototype, and now you’re putting it out in the real world and testing it. In other words, you get to see if your “hypothesis” works as you thought it would work. When you create a prototype, you assume it is intuitive and that users will be able to easily navigate. However, it is necessary to test the prototype with real users to either validate or reject those assumptions.
For instance, you go ahead and ask users to test your app that is connected to the smart collar. After seeing some users confused with how to navigate back to the dashboard, you take note of the pattern so you can make changes to your prototype in the future.
4. Iterate
Scientific Method
Now that you have found that your hypothesis was not supported, you should go back to step two, and formulate a new hypothesis, taking into account why the last one was not supported.
For instance, you hypothesized before that the ability to delay gratification as a child does not predict chances of success later in life, because the ability to delay gratification as a child is too small of an indicator for future success. Now, perhaps, you might hypothesize that the ability to delay gratification as a child does indeed impact future success, because this is a trait that is developed early on in childhood and built upon throughout development. Now, with this new hypothesis, you will go through the entire process again, experimenting to see if it is supported or not, and then iterating on it until your hypothesis is supported.
Design Process
In this phase, you have already found that there are certain parts of your design that need some reworking. Thus, you make changes to your design, conduct user testing again, and iterate again, until there are no major flaws with the design.
You decide to enlarge the back button for all the pages and to create tabs so that the information layout is more clear. You then perform user testing again, and iterate on this feedback once more.
Conclusion
If you think about it, it’s very natural for the design process to align with the scientific method, and vice versa. It really all boils down to a very human way of problem-solving: ask a question, have an answer in mind, test it, and do it all over again.
And it’s true what they say. Design is never done. Neither is science. It’s a continuous and iterative process. And that’s the beauty in it. There is no perfect result or product. The magic is in the process.
