Hypothesis Driven Design: Be the Francis Bacon of Your Product Team
There is power in knowing what you don’t know. So much inherent value lives within the gaps of knowledge that we all have when we’re designing products — the hard part is being brave enough to confront them and work through their complexities. One of the best ways to flesh out what you know vs. what you don’t know, is to form hypotheses about what you and your product team think you might know.
As designers, we’ve all heard the proverbial rule that we must have reasons behind our design decisions. However, good design doesn’t just start and end with a reason. It starts with a hypothesis.
In fact, if you want to design great products, you should have multiple hypotheses for everything you design— and you should seek to debunk all of them.
How a Design Hypothesis is Born
Thanks to Francis Bacon and his scientific posse, we have textbook methods for asking and answering questions by making observations and practicing experimentation. This exact kind of discovery found in observation and experimentation should be applied to design thinking.
Deductive Design Thinking
To borrow from Aristotle’s deductive reasoning, taking a deductive approach is the best way to identify a general theory. This way, you can start by forming a premise or theory, then get more specific as you refine your theory through experimentation later on.
Deductive reasoning is known as the “top-down approach” for a reason. You can’t experiment until you’ve identified what you need to test — this is where the hypothesis comes in. As you build a hypothesis, deduced from a general theory, you can more easily define your subject for experimentation.
A strong hypothesis makes a strong experiment, and is likely to produce highly actionable (positive or negative) results. Conversely, experimentation lacking a hypothesis can put you at risk of spending time and energy on the wrong stuff.
Deductive design thinking is great for concept testing and feature validation, by its nature of starting with broad premise and distilling it down into a more specific set of potential solutions.
Inductive Design Thinking
The inductive approach is opposite. Here, it’s all about starting with very specific observations. Within these observations, you can identify patterns and trends that are the perfect segway into a set of tentative hypotheses.
Once you’ve opened your observations up to more broad thinking and identified what you think you know, you’ll be able to land on some general theories to test later on.
Because of inductive reasoning, conclusions are allowed to be false. This is actually somewhat of a silver lining, as identifying where you’re wrong will only bring you closer to being right.
Inductive design thinking is best for developing product ideas and validating concepts at a higher level. The tentative hypotheses induced from this approach can help you and your team define your research direction. When you confront your theories head-on with testable hypotheses, you can easily figure out what assumptions you have about product or users that are wildly incorrect.
The Golden Rule: Ask Why Before Asking How
It’s not only important to form hypotheses in the research phase, but you must also let your hypothesis guide you through the design process. A strong hypothesis is the glue that ties a problem to a solution. Whether you’re solving for user stories or a visual style, you must always design with a hypothesis in mind.
Generating a hypothesis doesn’t stop at identifying an assumption and trying to find evidence to deem it as “true”. A good (false) hypothesis is where the learning happens. You should be trying to prove that hypothesis wrong. By testing things against your hypothesis, you can uncover learnings faster.
At Whistle, our product team focuses on hypothesis “buckets” to further identify themes within the educated guesses we are making. This allows us to be more agile in our design process.
Attitude Related Hypothesis: Understanding intention, need, and desire
Behavior Related Hypothesis: Understanding motivation and interaction
Feature Related Hypothesis: Understanding use cases and potential solutions (tying needs and desires to potential solutions, before actually committing to solutions)
Hypothesis as a Communication Tool
Spread the word and get your team on board!
A design hypothesis will have the most impact on your team’s designs if everyone is aware of it. When you evangelize your hypothesis, as well as the road leading to it, you can ensure that your whole team is keeping it in mind throughout the design process.
Interested in making cool products for people and their pets? Whistle is hiring! You can also reach out to me at malia@whistle.com
