Tag: hypothesis-driven-design

The second life-line as pointed out in the dimension of ‘Culture’ is “Cultural Shift towards Lean Philosophies” (Refer the part 5 of the current series here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/desops-next-wave-design-part-5-definition-3-dimensions-samir-dash/ ). In this part of the series, we will be deep diving for the same.

Typically any lean methodologies are based two basic goals:

1. Helping the organization understanding customer value
2. Using the key processes of the organization to continuously increase it and work towards delivering a perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process with zero waste.

In the context of Design and User Experience(UX), in the seminal book Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf, provides some lean methodologies break the stalemate between the speed of Agile and the need for design in product development lifecycle” [Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seidenjeff, The Lean UX]. If we observe closely, the basic foundations of Lean UX prescribed are common to the core Lean philosophies, namely:

1. Remove Wastage from Design Process — Moving away from heavy documentation to a process that creates artefacts which can be directly used in the design and development lifecycle itself.
2. Cross-functional Collaboration — All the stakeholders from any parts of the product lifecycle including the designer, developers, quality experts, analysts, marketers and end-users all collaborate in a transparent and productive way.
3. Experimentation Based Iterative Execution — So fundamentally it alludes to the UCD core principles, that assumes that the designer (or the team) learns from the execution of the prototypes in an iterative cycle that starts early in the product lifecycle, from which the learning is used as an input to improve the product along the way. If you notice this is the very basis of what we talked about the continuous and integrated feedback loop.

The use of Agile and Design Thinking practices can be seen alluding to the philosophies above. However, regarding the third philosophy — to ensure that the designer has the right approach to conduct the experimentation so that the feedback can be used in a productive way to take informative decision making along the way across the design process requires some non-ambiguous methodologies that can help the designer making some assumption and validate that through experimentation. This is the basis of one of the core foundations of Lean UX and related lean methodologies, which is popularly known as Hypothesis-Driven Design (HDD). As any design that we produce is based on certain assumption and HDD provides the non-ambiguous approach to the same, that follows the third philosophy i.e. Experimentation Based Iterative Execution.

“Declaring assumptions is the first step, in Lean UX process” [Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seidenjeff, The Lean UX] . This statement reflects how the assumptions or the hypothesis is the core the Lean UX principles. Basically, the four steps in the Lean UX approach is the same blocks that appear while in HDD, and can be mapped to the following blocks:

1. Making Assumption / Formation of Hypothesis
2. Build a Prototype / Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
3. Execute / Run the Prototype
4. Get Feedback / Observation

Now step 4 is the feedback loop that connects to step 1 making a cycle, thereby using the feedback from current iteration as the input to form the assumption for the next iteration.

Interestingly this means the HDD process always depends on outcomes rather than traditional outputs of any traditional process. The outcomes are kind of hints from the segment that can give direction to the design along the way and help in getting incremental validation of the vision by acting as “evidence” or the and more precisely they are the factors that help in “course correction” for the design. As the outcomes of the assumption act as pieces of evidence, it helps in making data-driven decisions.

You may ask, does that mean the design is reduced to quantitative factors which will act as evidence to support some of the designs? Now, here is the interesting aspect that helps to understand the approach — the feedback or the evidence can be either quantitative or qualitative in nature. And to avoid the risk of being limited to measurement-driven design, the qualitative perspective is provided equal footing in HDD approach. This makes a fit case for DesOps that can help in converging the technology with this philosophy to form required service design solution powered by machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation. The aspect of the actual implementation using technology is what we will be exploring in coming articles of this series, mostly while discussing the third dimension i.e. technology.

The very first step in HDD, i.e. “Making Assumption / Formation of Hypothesis” involves articulation of the assumption or the hypothesis. And this is the most important aspect of HDD, as the other steps depend on this. Typical hypothesis statement can be framed as per the following simplest form —

I think doing [this] will result in [that ].

There multiple variations to this that many professionals use in their area for HDD based research and design /development activities. Some add the factors such as the segment or the persona or the end user of the product, something like the following —

For [user / him/her ] I think doing [this] will result in [that ].

If you see the above keeps segment in a context that helps it keep focused on to specific persona, which thereby can lead to the user-centred design process. This is essentially labelled by many as a design hypothesis.

Some use additional factors of forming negation of the hypothesis by adding an attribute like whether this hypothesis is believed by him as true or false. To formulate a null hypothesis and thereby move on to define an alternate hypothesis (which is essentially a negation to the null hypothesis one craves to validate, but due to nature and structure or any metrics associated with that, it may not practically be possible to achieve that. So in such kind of cases the implicitly the state of belief is presented as another factor to take part in the validation process —

Because I think [this] is true, I think doing [this] will result in [that ].

I believe that any hypothesis statement can be cultivated from the bare-bones model of cause and effect being rendered as a formalized statement of “if …. then” or “when … then” kind of format. At least this gives a more practical approach to build a real-world HDD based system which is technically feasible and is the essence of any DesOps system.

The next important aspect in this regard is how to ensure that we are considering the qualitative aspect of the evidence, as discussed above. If we look at irrespective of the fact that there is a crowd of applications out there which claims to support the business through a data-informed approached, they are primarily a set of some variation between the extremes like A/B testing tools and data-driven analytics and data modelling based prediction systems. But if we notice with care at the core of HDD we found that the essence of HDD lies in making sense of the data and treat it as evidence so as to inject it to a UCD based process to fuel design or business decisions. Though coming up with a real-world HDD system would require similar tools and technologies of data-driven systems, but they will be supporting components to HDD based system. In this regard, the real HDD based full fledged system is literally non-existent as of today, while I am writing this article. In regards to DesOps, this makes a lot of difference, as most of the HDD frameworks out there are not 100% autonomous. Most of the implementation of HDD is mostly based on the work practices and methodologies, which is implemented depending on the need and feasibility. However, these are good enough when we use these, in context to the tools we gain from UCD, Lean models and the Design Thinking principles. But, it is interesting that the philosophies of DesOps, take it to the next level, making it autonomous and integrated with the over-arching feedback loop we have been referring many times.

To be continued… Keep tuned in.

(c) 2018, Samir Dash. All rights reserved.