Early in 2020 during the global pandemic, with time to reflect, a collection of passionate people with a love of understanding developed a pledge to make to change the way people work.
The disconnect between how we want to operate and how we operate became quite wide.
Michael Castleman completed a study to establish just on split testing if people were or were not split testing, and if they believed in it. The results where overwhelming that people wanted to test, but did not test.
Beyond the obvious time constraints of normal roles in this area, one problem become clear and that is a culture which shames saying “I have an idea, let’s test it.”
To change the culture and create the expectation that you hire people to complete work they have never done before, we wanted to build a pledge, a movement and start to present our opinion. Often the person who says I know what to do, with no testing is rewarded because they are decisive.
However we need to value the curious and seek to work in a scientific way.
This is the pledge we make:
“We pledge to seek to understanding users scientifically.
That our understanding of the user is a tentative explanation of things; it is made of compelling problems and hypothetical solutions for them. That users are a fluid river of individuals with moving set up beliefs and desires.That we can dig deeper and deeper into the structure of reality, discovering new problems and proposing new theoretical solutions for old problems.
We believe there are universal laws and frameworks, and approaches that will succeed if tried. We believe in our core we are looking to help create trust for a product. That as scientists we can find solutions.
The difference between science and other ways of doing business is science adheres to the tradition of evaluating hypothetical explanations critically, which, whenever possible, includes empirical tests.
The method of science is the checking of theories; that is, their critical evaluation and replacement by better candidates, guided by the idea of searching for truth. “
If you go to our pledge page you can make that pledge yourself.