There’s been a lot of talk about design thinking. What it means, how to apply its principles, and even if it’s a new concept. While design thinking is often applied to more scientific endeavors, scientific thinking can also benefit design. While it may be a less-trendy topic, a scientific approach to design is certainly effective. Scientific principles lead to better decision making about designs, which ultimately leads to a better user experience. Not through intuition or one’s job title, but through data.
You don’t have to wear a lab coat or have an advanced degree to make better decisions with data. There isn’t an official guide or set of steps in the “scientific method.” Instead, it’s about applying principles and using data.
In this talk, author Jeff Sauro discuss:
- How to apply scientific thinking toward several design scenarios
- How to form a testable hypothesis
- Ways to operationalize a study with the right tasks, metrics and methods
- The importance of randomization to minimize nuisance variables
- Analyzing data to differentiate real change from random noise