How to Use Design Experiments to Create Viable Products
Creating a business case for changes or the creation of new products can be difficult. Where do you begin? How do you get the necessary feedback? Many of these issues can be addressed through design experiments both during and after the process outlined here.
Throughout this process, you’ll learn more about your customers and what they want. By going through these steps, you’ll create much more viable and successful products.
What Are Design Experiments?
If you can think back to the last time you created a scientific experiment and conducted it, it was likely back in your school days. However, this process has proven to be an extremely beneficial one for anyone to pick up and run within many different formats, industries, and situations.
Design experiments are a structured and iterative process where you can arrive at objective outcomes given within a framework and set of parameters. This means it provides a direction with practical steps you can take. Steps that result in a solution that is not only practical for users but also saves time and money in the development process.
What does design experimenting provide?
There are many reasons to use design experiments when creating or updating a product. These are just a few of them:
More precise, objective conclusions. Having this framework allows you to remove assumptions from the design process. It helps you rely on causation-based data instead of assumptions based on correlation or past experiences. It also helps mitigate confusion and ambiguity.
Unearth new opportunities. During experiments, you’ll come to learn a great deal about your users. They may spark new creations or solutions from your learnings.
Reveals (potential) problems. It helps you adapt to the environment, people, and times, making for much happier customers.
Creates more effective results. Once you understand what your users need, you’re able to create a much more useful product without having to iterate needlessly.
Stay competitive. If you’re regularly consulting with users, you’ll be ahead of the curve compared to competitors.
Considerations
Whichever experiments you choose to run, the goal is to create user-friendly products so they actually get used. By removing friction found during your design experiments, you’re able to reduce room for error and create a more intuitive design. Focus on using a user-centered design approach and you’ll also improve product development.
It’s also going to be telling if you have not created a culture of experimentation within your organization. Your team will not be as prepared to create experiments, discover and make mistakes, or keep their ego at bay.
Practical Steps to Create Viable Solutions
Now you know that there are opportunities possible as well as the pressure of keeping up with the competition. Start by taking these steps to integrate the design process into your product development.
Define your goals and potential outcomes. What are you looking to have or do at the end of this experiment? What is most important in progressing the success of your product?
Identify opportunities. Based on your goals, consider openings that could present themselves. For example, if your goal is to get more registrations on your website, an opportunity might be to get more email signups for interested leads.
Define your hypothesis. What do you believe will be the result of this test? Can it be proven or disproven? Determine a hypothesis that will provide the next step. For example, your hypothesis could be that by driving people to register on your website, you will get 2x as many email signups from interested parties.
Create designs based on the goals and hypothesis. For example, if your goal is to have more people fill out an interest form on your website and you believe your users would prefer to send an email rather than fill out an online form, try both.
Test experiments for user feedback. There are different types of tests you can run including a/b tests and multivariable tests. Choose which works best for your product and hypothesis in the most unbiased way.
Analyze the results. Which test was more successful? Evaluate why you think that is based on the users’ experiences, comments, and feedback. User feedback alone can provide ways to help your company solve your real-world problems.
Plan next steps. Based on your results, this is where you figure out whether the hypothesis was correct or incorrect and identify whether this will impact other hypotheses you've already determined.
Iterate and start from the top. Now that you know what your users want, you can make the changes and re-test! It’s imperative to use what you’ve learned and incorporate them or risk losing money on both the time on the test and the product.
This can (and often should) be a continuous process for your products. It will help you stay in touch with what your users want, stay current with the times, and always truly know your customers. It also helps provide foresight into what may be coming — thus providing opportunities for new products or changes.
You can also utilize tools specific to web testing experiments like Optimizely, Usability Hub, and Google Optimize. These are great if you’re looking to learn if your customers click on a red or green button, for example. Other simple tests can be conducted with these as well without any coding needed.
Prepare Properly
An important pre-step to getting design experiments set up is having the right tools. There are many available, of course, and it depends upon your product and test. You can even start with something as simple as a spreadsheet. It will help you keep track of your experiments and avoid repeating them while giving you a quick overview of results.
Now Test, Iterate, and Test Some More
Now that you’ve got the steps, it’s time to act. Dig in and create a design process or invite us to help you along your path. We work hand-in-hand with your team to create and run the experiment, provide training for new products, and tools for continuous learning and improvement.
