Design Thinking For Dummies

Chapter 14

Testing Ideas and Assumptions

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining goals for the test phase

Formulating assumptions about your target users and your idea

Planning effective interview strategies

Analyzing visitor behavior on websites

Design thinking lives off early feedback from potential customers about your ideas and your assumptions. You can learn from this feedback, adapting your assumptions and solutions to a new reality. Think of this process as an experiment in which you make an assumption and test it through exchanges with your target users. This chapter gives you an overview of how best to test your ideas and assumptions. The steps are straightforward: Decide what you want to learn with the test method, and then formulate and check various assumptions about the behavior of your target users, their problems and wishes, as well as your ideas for a solution. You’ll find out how to execute these tests using interviews and online studies.

Clarifying Tasks in the Test Phase

In the test phase, you should proceed like a researcher — in other words, come up with a hypothesis and then ...