How to Create Hypotheses in VWO?

The initial step in website optimization is to formulate a hypothesis for the things you want to test on your website. In this article, you'll learn about the best practices for hypothesis formation along with the process of creating one in VWO.

Best Practices for Creating a Hypothesis

1. Think deep: With the existing data, preliminary research, and understanding, identify the problems on your website that you feel are potential issues or opportunities.
2. Make an educated guess: Based on what you already know and what you have already learned from your research, make an educated guess, and come up with the answers/solutions that might help solve the problem you observed on your website.
3. Keep it clear: A good hypothesis is written in clear and simple language. Reading your hypothesis should tell exactly what you thought was going to happen when you started the experiment.
4. Be specific: Your hypothesis must be formed for a particular and specific problem. It should not include generalization. In case it does, then a hypothesis cannot reach the correct conclusions. For example, You can form a hypothesis like “This specific design will increase conversions” instead of “Redesigning the landing page will increase conversions.”
5. Ensure that your hypothesis is testable: To prove or disprove your hypothesis, you need to be able to do an experiment and make observations to see how things work. Also, you should be able to repeat your experiment over and over again, if necessary.
6. Define metrics: Define the metrics that would help in deriving conclusions.

Putting It to Work

To demonstrate the above best practices and techniques for developing and writing a testable hypothesis, let’s have a look at this example:

“Adding a countdown timer on the homepage or in the header of every page of your website during the sale period will create a sense of urgency, and more conversions will happen as visitors try to shop more before the time runs out.”

This hypothesis is good because it is testable, simple, written as a statement, and establishes the participants (visitor), variables (sale, countdown timer), and predicts effect (adding countdown time will help in increasing conversions).”

Creating a Hypothesis in VWO

In VWO, you can create a hypothesis from any of these sections:

• The Hypotheses dashboard
• The Test dashboard
• The Observations dashboard

Create a Hypothesis Using the Hypotheses Dashboard

To create a hypothesis using the VWO hypothesis dashboard, perform this:

Procedure

1. Login to your VWO account.
2. From the panel on the left, go to Plan > Hypotheses.
3. To create a hypothesis, click the Create button.
4. In the New Hypothesis pop-up, enter the following: 

• Based on Observation: Enter a brief informative description of the observation on which you have built the hypothesis.
• I expect that: Enter a solution that you expect will solve the problem. For example, changing the color of the Sign-up button from orange to green may attract more clicks.
• Will address: Enter the problem that you are addressing.
• Prioritization Score: Prioritization will help you organize the multiple hypotheses in a logical order. Enter a score for each prioritizing parameter – confidence, importance, and ease. VWO will calculate the priority score for the hypothesis based on the score you provide to each parameter. To know more about prioritizing Hypothesis, refer to Prioritizing Hypothesis in VWO.
• Source: Enter the Page URL/Backend service where you observed that this hypothesis is based on. For web testing, this could be the Page URL whereas, the Backend service for VWO FullStack.
• Attachments: Upload attachments relevant to the hypothesis.
• Labels: Enter labels to make the Hypothesis easily searchable.
  

5. To finalize your hypothesis, click Create.
Upon successful creation, a hypothesis will appear under the Backlog section of the progress view.

Create a Hypothesis Using the Test dashboard

To create a hypothesis using the VWO test dashboard, perform this:

Procedure

1. Login to your VWO account.
2. From the panel on the left, go to Testing and select the type of test you want to work with, say A/B.
3. To start with, click Create to create a test.
4. Navigate to Configurations > More configurations > Hypothesis > Create a new hypothesis to create a new hypothesis.
5. The hypothesis pop-up appears, and you can enter the relevant details for your hypothesis.  
6. To finalize your hypothesis, click Create.

Create a Hypothesis Using the Observations dashboard

To create a hypothesis using the VWO observations dashboard, perform this:

Procedure

1. Login to your VWO account.
2. From the panel on the left, go to Plan > Observations.
3. From the observations dashboard, click on the checkbox corresponding to an observation. With this, the option to create a new hypothesis appears at the top of the dashboard.
4. To create a new hypothesis, click on the New Hypothesis option.
5. The hypothesis pop-up appears, and you can enter the relevant details for your hypothesis.  
6. To finalize your hypothesis, click Create.
   To know how to link an observation to a hypothesis, refer to Linking Observations to Hypotheses in VWO.