Forming a Hypothesis

A hypothesis is an assumption, which can be taken as true for the purpose of argument, that provides a tentative explanation that can be tested by further investigation.

Try to think about your hypothesis in terms of alternative pages, images, or processes that could be substituted easily for existing ones.

Your hypothesis must be able to produce a result with statistical significance. This can be achieved by increasing the percentage of visitors included in the test, or by running the test for a longer period of time.

At this point, you also should define your visitor-based success metrics, either as part of the hypothesis or as an additional matrix.

Hypothesis: Moving the “Request a Demo” graphical link closer to the top of the page results in a Visitor Conversion increase of at least 1.5%.

In our example hypothesis, we have defined the success criterion for this experiment as an increase in Visitor Conversion of at least 1.5%.