Design is a Hypothesis

Design presentations are tough: presenting a vision for a client or a team of what their product or website should look like requires equal parts creativity and an ability to read the room: who has strong opinions about what the Brand represents? Who has a vision already for what this should look like? Who hates the color blue?

It is not surprising that many visual designers find this environment intimidating. It is less surprising that they are inclined to “defend” their designs or come prepared to battle for their vision.

But what if this process is backwards? What if there’s another way?

What if Design is not supposed to answer a question, but to reveal new ones?

If I have one guiding theory in moments like these, it is curiosity. I believe that Design, as an act of choosing what to include and what not to include, is deeply intertwined with strategy. And because strategy is ultimately about creating a future which does not yet exist, Design must synthesize varying opinions about what that future could look like and must do so in a logically sound way.

Will customers want to choose between these several categories? Will partners want to know more about our commitment to sustainability? Will investors be interested in the story we want to tell about where we are going, not just the numbers which show where we’ve been?

All of these questions can have answers rooted in data, but because all data is fundamentally descriptive of the past, the data cannot proscribe what a design should be. At best, it can suggest possibilities: prioritizations of audiences’ needs; indicators of their preferences; suggestions about what they have liked and responded to in the past.

Much of this data comes from the research we do as Experience Design practitioners, especially formative research like ethnographic observation, heuristic analysis, and observational studies.

But until measurement is applied to a design – usability testing, systematic analytics, outcomes-based measurement, and conversion tracking, among many other forms of analysis – a design is a hypothesis about what the future of an experience might look like. It is open to disproof – it might not work! – and in the best of circumstances, it is one of several competing hypotheses about what will work best under varying circumstances.

Imagine a design review where all stakeholders – designers, developers, marketing, leadership – are asked not to evaluate whether a design felt “right” or “on-brand”, but whether how likely the design is to yield useful data: about whether the future relation between the organization and its audience can be achieved; about whether audiences’ perceptions and preferences are accurately understood and anticipated; about whether users’ desired outcomes are easier and more enjoyable for them to achieve.

In that environment, questions about a proposed design would focus more on whether it is testing the right assumptions. Stakeholders can ask, “which of these designs will reveal something about our audience that we don’t already know?” Is it giving us a logical choice between two or more possible futures, and likely to help us gather the data which will help inform the next set of choices?

Design can serve to push forward the frontier of what an organization has learned and reveal answers to questions which its competitors have not yet thought to ask.