Your goal is the destination. A strong hypothesis is the compass — one test at a time, you’ll learn what to keep and what to leave behind.
Imagine that your goals are the destination.
Hypotheses are what guide your efforts towards that goal. Every hypothesis you prove or disprove is pushing you forward. Helping you decide between what to move forward with and what shouldn’t be part of your journey (basically you were wrong)
Now I’m not going to tell you the ins and outs of hypotheses, if and when you should use them but I am going to tell you what makes a good one. Because the thing you need to be good at here is evaluating one. We are going to use AI to do some of the heavy lifting, but it's up to you to decide three things.
1. Can I answer this confidently in a week? Specificity.
2. Can I measure how right or wrong I was? Measurability.
3. Can I repeat this? Repeatability.
Specific means having the ability to scope your prediction. Being bold is good. Being unrealistic is bad. Measurable means adding a numeric value. This could be a percentage or a metric. Repeatable means to run the hypothesis more than once and get similar results.
You have 4 prompts to choose from. And context does matter, the reason why there's 5 is because they relate to specific steps in the user research process.
- Prompt 1 helps you to shape your lose thoughts into structure
- Prompt 2 turns your assumptions into hypothesis
- Prompt 3 focuses on analytics
- Prompt 4 is a useful workshop exercise
We’ve created a tool that will generate a score for your hypothesis. Don’t worry if some of them get a bad score. We will suggest ways for you to get that score going in the right direction.
The thing we want is for you to keep moving forward and to create something that’s consistent from day 1. You don’t need to know the knowledge but if you do, you can always manually evaluate the hypothesis.
You use it to help with your study questions. Hypothesis help you highlight the areas that you want to make decisions on. And at the end of the study you are able to add some solid numbers to them e.g. 85% of people could use the AI prompt successfully.
And honestly, everyone loves a good number. It’s what gives us a confidence boost in the decision we are going to make.
Look I'm not saying you should mark your own homework but you totally should. You need to have a moment to pause and evaluate what you're doing.
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