Scientific thinking vs wishful thinking in product design
It is easy to build a product that no one needs. It is easy to build a feature that no one uses. It is easy to have ideas. It is easy to dream. But the reality is harder. It is hard to design products. It is hard to create things that people use. It is hard to build new habits. It is hard to change behaviours. It is hard to fit into people’s routines.
Wishful thinking is easy. It is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire.
Christopher Booker described wishful thinking in terms of:
“the fantasy cycle” … a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history — and in storytelling. When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.
Scientific thinking is harder. Scientific thinking refers to the set of reasoning processes that include: asking questions, making observations, recognising patterns, making inferences, induction, deduction, experimental design, causal reasoning, concept formation, hypothesis testing and so on.
The easiest thing in product design is wishful thinking. This is the part where you think your product idea is great, and you start looking for any evidence to support your wishful thinking. That’s the part where you lose reality. You start avoiding all feedback that doesn’t support your idea. You look for confirmation of your idea. Instead of asking why people would not care about your product, you ask “Would you use my great product? And start looking for answers “Yes, we will use it”. You start to imagine your product being used by millions of people, and all you have to do is to build a product and add lots of features to it. Then wait till they all give up everything they did and used before and suddenly will start using your brilliant solution.
The reality is different. The reality doesn’t care about you, your wishful thinking and your product. It is completely different. That’s where scientific thinking comes in. It teaches you to distinguish reality from fantasy. It brings you down to earth. You start looking for evidence that goes against your idea, not to support it, but to reject it. Not to confirm you are right, but to find evidence why you could be wrong. Not to look why people would care about your product, but to find out why they would not care.
It doesn’t really matter what framework you use to design products. It could be design thinking framework with 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Or 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. The most important part is not the framework, but the thinking behind it. Not the wishful one. You do not need to be a scientist, or have a degree, just question yourself and your ideas, find evidence why you might be wrong, why your product might not be needed, why people would not care.
When you get the evidence and face it, now it is time to change people’s behavior. That’s the innovation part.
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