Software is a risk because you are solving human problems and, as we have discussed, humans are hard to understand. If you believe you are solving problems correctly, it requires you establishing a question to ask to know whether you have solved the problem. A software hypothesis works like any other hypothesis and becomes a starting place for understanding whether your idea, built into computer software, works. Prototyping, as we have been discussing, is a way to test your hypothesis. As an HCI designer, setting a good hypothesis allows you and your team to focus on what they believe they can achieve.
A hypothesis states the HCI team's predictions about what your software will do for your user, and is a preliminary answer to either a research question or a business problem that a piece of software is hoping to solve but that has not yet been tested. Some software teams will write multiple hypotheses that address different features or assumptions...