Why would we approach the building of an enterprise with science?
Science is exceptional at delivering outcomes through testing. By applying the scientific method we can structure our work to move towards an unbiased solution that delivers outcomes.
When we are looking to improve the marketing of a product there are a few ways to do it. In contrast, design thinking comes from an Apple approach which is very unscientific. Designers sit back and imagine what is possible, they dream up something that will amaze the world and the user and build it. This works for Apple, some of the time.
The other alternative is more conservative and comes from a humble place of curiosity and wonder. User Science is about saying, “I have a series of hypothesis that I have deduced from the study and now I shall run experiments to design the solution.”
Even before the hypothesis there is a method to the understanding of the problem that is scientific. The user scientist collects a variety of data and interviews to understand the user from many angles.
Interviewing the subject in focus groups with psychological tests, journeying into the wild like an anthropologist and studying the human user in their natural habitat to observe behaviour are two methods. Another method is to collect data on users from multiple sources like a data scientist to seek patterns, exceptions and anomalies.
With an hypothesis, a user scientist seeks, like all scientists, to prove their theories right or wrong through testing. Aristotle is recognized as the author of the scientific method, Ibn al-Haytham proposed in the early 900’s that something should be repeatable with the same inputs and outputs. As marketers and product owners applying this method comes from a belief that we can test and discover independently the best course of action for development and marketing of a product.
With all products we now find this journey of a user to purchase and satisfaction has many steps. We might be very good at developing a landing page that effectively signs up people to a free trial, but the product doesn’t match the offer and there are low conversions. Our problem in most cases is that we have limited time and limited data to make effective scientific analysis.
This doesn’t mean we can’t find a good marriage of “gut” marketing, or common-sense marketing and scientific testing and this balance needs to be pragmatic about delivery.