In general, observation is the act of noticing something seen or experienced, or it may be something of value that you measure or count during a study or experiment. For example, measuring how well your website performs after you rolled out the new UI.
Observations may reveal problems and would, in turn, offer some meaningful insights which you might want to address to get the best outcome.
Consider that you are an e-commerce company and have observed that visitors on your website often struggle or do not take the desired action, and you would like to know why. For example, visitors on your website add the products to their carts, but many of them are dropping off before the purchase is complete. To address this, you make certain observations to identify why visitors aren’t checking out the products.
These observations may help you identify some potential issues like- technical problems (say, site loads too slow), the inappropriate visual hierarchy on a page (say, the positioning of the checkout button is not right), distractions from CTA (say, a fancy carousel that distracts users from the checkout button, or you may even find that the information displayed on the website does not convey the purpose), or there can be many more.
In VWO, you can record any number of observations you believe would help improve your website experience. Typically, these observations are the basis for identifying common patterns or problems, leading to potential opportunities for optimization.
Once you have created an observation, you can use it to create a hypothesis that can be tested to optimize your website's conversions. To learn how to create an observation, refer to How to Create an Observation in VWO.