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How to create product design hypotheses: a step-by-step guide

(or, How to take down a rampaging HiPPO in one move)

Ivan Schneiders
UX Collective
12 min readApr 25, 2021

Watch me tip over this hippo — Photo by @tmdpw

So, you’ve decided to get your product team running Lean. You might even have a degree in behavioural science and understand the scientific method as if you were suckled on Karl Popper’s breast, but your team… not so much. Worse still, the minute you start talking about induction and deduction or null and alternate hypotheses everyone’s eyes glaze over and you realise that if this was an experiment you’d be rejecting the hypothesis that ‘Lean will help me make better products’ (and imagine trying to explain that you’d actually be accepting the null hypothesis). Let’s not do that. I’m going to simply walk you through the what, why and how of hypothesis-driven design with a step-by-step guide.

(Cheat code: There’s a one-minute guide at the bottom of this page).

What is a product design hypothesis?

Well, the first thing to accept is that no matter how much research you do, your product is just a theoretical solution to a human need or want that you hope will result in business success. The…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Ivan Schneiders

International award-winning design leader - interaction and behavioural expert, coach, writer, speaker, milk, bread, cereal, potato, something for dessert

Responses (4)

What are your thoughts?

However, it is statistically possible that some are more, or less, amazing than others

A lot of people that take on the Lean approach seem to think that they should just get in a room ‘ideate’, then throw it out to customers and see what sticks.