2. Hypotheses: what we believe we already know

You’ve established the objectives of your research, and your head is already swimming with potential design solutions, which your team has discussed. Can’t you just go execute those ideas and ship them?

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. All designers have early ideas and assumptions about their product. Some clients may have initial hypotheses that they would like “tested” as well.

“Your hypotheses often constitute how you think and feel about the problem you’ve been asked to solve, and they fuel the early stages of work,” says Jon Freach, a design research director at Frog. Don’t be afraid to address these hypotheses and, when appropriate, integrate them into your research process to help you prove or disprove their merit. Here’s why:

•Externalizing your hypotheses is important to becoming aware of and minimizing the influence of your team’s and client’s biases.

•Being aware of your hypotheses will help you select the right methods to fulfill your research objective.

•You can use your early hypotheses to help communicate what you’ve discovered through the research process. (“We believed that [insert hypothesis], but we discovered that [insert finding from research].”)

Generating research hypotheses is easy. Take your framing questions from when you formulated the objective and, as a team, spend five to eight minutes individually sketching answers to them, whether by writing out your ideas on sticky notes, sketching designs and so forth. For example, when thinking about the clip-sharing feature for your next-generation TV program guide, your team members would put their heads together and generate hypotheses such as these:

•Attitude-related hypothesis “TV watchers who use social networks like to hear about their friends’ favorite TV shows.”

•Behavior-related hypothesis “TV watchers only want to share clips from shows they watch most frequently.”

•Feature-related hypothesis “TV watchers are more likely to share a highlight from a show if it’s popular with other viewers as well.”

3. Methods: how we plan to fill the gaps in our knowledge

Once you have a defined research objective and a pile of design hypotheses, you’re ready to consider which research methods are most appropriate to achieving your objective. Usually, I’ll combine methods from more than one of the following categories to achieve my research objective. (People have written whole books about this subject. See the end of this article for further reading on user research methods and processes.)

Methods such as contextual inquiry, whereby you spend time with people where they live and work, help you build a strong foundational understanding of how they live and of potentially unmet needs.

BUILDING A FOUNDATION

Methods in this area could include surveys, observational or contextual interviews, and market and trend explorations. Use these methods when you don’t have a good understanding of the people you are designing for, whether they’re a niche community or a user segment whose behaviors shift rapidly. If you have unanswered questions about your user base — where they go, what they do and why — then you’ll probably have to draw upon methods from this area first.

Methods such as card sorting can help you understand how people organize and prioritize different types of information that’s important to them — as well as help you generate new ideas and concepts that could prove critical in your interactive designs.

GENERATING INSPIRATION AND IDEAS

Methods in this area could include diary studies, card sorting, paper prototyping and other participatory design activities. Once I understand my audience’s expertise and beliefs well, I’m ready to delve deeper into what content, functionality or products would best meet their needs. This can be done by generating potential design solutions in close collaboration with research participants, as well as by receiving their feedback on early design hypotheses.

Specifically, we can do this by generating or co-creating sketches, collages, rough interface examples, diagrams and other types of stimuli, as well as by sorting and prioritizing information. These activities will help us understand how our audience views the world and what solutions we can create to fit that view (i.e. “mental models”). This helps to answer our “What,” “Where,” “When” and “How” framing questions. Feedback at this point is not meant to refine any tight design concepts or code prototypes. Instead, it opens up new possibilities.

Methods such as usability testing can help us refine and improve existing design ideas and website or application designs, as well as uncover gaps in knowledge that we may not have considered. While what’s shown above is a formal usability testing lab set-up, there are many ways to conduct similar tests³ with a wide range of tools, both on site and remotely.

EVALUATING AND INFORMING DESIGN

Methods in this area could include usability testing, heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs and paper prototyping. Once we’ve identified the functionality or content that’s appropriate for a user, how do we present it to them in a manner that’s useful and delightful? I use methods in this area to refine design comps, simulations and code prototypes. This helps us to answer questions about how users would want to use a product or to perform a key task. This feedback is critical and, as part of an iterative design process, enables us to refine and advance concepts to better meet user needs.

Let’s go back to our hypothetical example, so that you can see how your research objective and hypotheses determine which methods your team will select. Take all of your hypotheses — I like to start with at least 100 hypotheses — and arrange them on a continuum:

I like to write all of my research hypotheses on sticky notes, and cluster them to identify how they may be proved or disproved through different research methods.

On the left, place hypotheses related to who your users are, where they live and work, their goals, their needs and so forth. On the right, place hypotheses that have to do with explicit functionality or design solutions you want to test with users. In the center, place hypotheses related to the types of content or functionality that you think might be relevant to users. This point of this activity is not to create an absolute scale or arrangement of hypotheses that you’ve created so far. The point is for your team to cluster the hypotheses, finding important themes or affinities that will help you to select particular methods. Serota says:

Choosing and refining your methods and approach is a design project within itself. It takes iteration, practice and time. Test things out on your friends and coworkers to see what works and the best way to ask open-ended questions.

Back to our clip-sharing research effort. When your team looks at all of the hypotheses you’ve created to date, it will realize that using two research methods would be most valuable. The first method will be a participatory design activity, in which you’ll create with users a timeline of where and when they share their favorite TV moments with others. This will give your team foundational knowledge of situations in which clips might be shared, as well as generate opportunities for clip-sharing that you can discuss with users.

The second method will be an evaluative paper-prototyping activity, in which you will present higher-fidelity paper prototypes of ideas on how people can share TV clips. This method will help you address your hypotheses on what solutions make the most sense in sharing situations. (Using two methods is best because mixing and matching hypotheses across different categories within a research session could confuse research participants.)

You can conduct multiple methods when meeting with users. My preference is to conduct at least two different methods, moving from hearing people share stories about their lives to encouraging them to be creative in participatory activities.