Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 7]

In business we are always dealing with assumptions. In almost every single event in our lives we do things because we think/assume that other people may like it.

What is an assumption really?

Let’s take some examples we can work with.
“I bought this present for you because I assumed that you may love it”

“I write this article because I’m assuming that you will find it useful”
… and you will 🙂

Why we should care

End of the story here… but what happens when a team works around one single assumption for months?

Now we are taking our assumptions a little bit seriously and we start to bring them on the flow — or at least we should do it.

If we assume that our target audience will use, enjoy or even just see our new features in place in a project and we don’t find a way to identify and measure our success I can guarantee we will be in trouble… and this is another assumption but based on previous experiences working during months in features or projects people never used. Sad.

What risky assumption really means?

When an assumptions becomes risky what it really means is that we are assuming something without having any study, information, evidence that supports it.

It is basically a thought that we expect or would like to:
“I assume he is in love with me because he was watching me twice today in the classroom” — may be he is truly in love with her but we don’t have enough evidence to say it and it would be very risky to assume it!

Should we ask him? No, it’s too direct.
Should we follow him? Stalk him? Yes, let’s do it… and suddenly we discover that he went to the optician to get new glasses. He has an eye deviation, so he couldn’t focus properly on the black board.

Oh God, my assumption went all wrong!

Let’s identify our assumptions before catastrophe

We can do something and better do it before rather than we start building a feature we are not certain about it.

In IBM, we use to have a how-to guide to run ‘Assumption and Questions’ workshop where teams collaborate and iterate to come up with a four quadrants of assumptions —High-risk on the top, Low-risk on the bottom, Certain on the left, and Uncertain on the right.

Assumptions Grid.

HOW-TO run an Assumptions workshop (30 minutes)
1. Let’s divide the wall in four quadrants, adding words as the above diagram shows.
2. Ask your team to write 1 assumptions per sticky notes — as many as they can come up with.
3. Start the discussion within you team where those sticky notes should be placed.
4. Identify the riskiest assumptions on the left high quadrant.
5. Rank the assumptions from the riskiest to low risk ones.
Think on user research methods that may help your team to validate the assumptions.

Let’s user research begins

Once you have your assumptions well defined and ranked, it’s time to move to user research to validate them.

Move it forward in the design process

Let’s review the assumptions every time we gather some new insights from user research. Even better, let’s keep the assumptions besides the research insights wall.

Let’s move the riskiest assumptions to more certain ones based on truly user research insights.

Let us know how you do it.
Share your experiences on this topic.
Pass the pen… let’s learn together 🙂

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Natalia Rey — UX Designer at RedGate, mom of 2 little creatures & illustrator on her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Riskiest Assumptions was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Riskiest Assumptions

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