# Understand the research and experimentation model

Know when to use observations, insights, learnings, ideas, and experiments.

Each work item answers a different question. Keeping those questions separate makes it easier to trace a decision back to evidence.

| Item        | Use it for                                                 | Example                                                      |
| ----------- | ---------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Observation | What was seen or reported in a source                      | Three interviewees asked about delivery charges.             |
| Insight     | What the evidence suggests about a problem or opportunity  | Unclear delivery costs make the total price hard to assess.  |
| Learning    | What the team now understands, with context and confidence | Delivery information helped first-time buyers in this test.  |
| Idea        | A possible change worth considering                        | Put delivery information beside the price.                   |
| Experiment  | A planned test of a hypothesis                             | Compare the current page with explicit delivery information. |

## Link the work

An observation can support an insight. Insights can connect to ideas, experiments, and learnings. These relationships preserve the reason for an idea and make later outcomes discoverable.

A **Team** is the shared workspace and access boundary. A **Project** organizes related optimization work within it. Pages, audiences, metrics, tags, labels, and states give project work a consistent vocabulary.

## Keep source and interpretation distinguishable

Record the source and confidence when the field is available. Avoid copying the same statement into every work-item type: the observation captures evidence, the insight interprets it, and the idea proposes action. A learning should retain the conditions under which it was supported.

[Research guides](https://conversionlab.app/docs/research) explain the links in detail. [Project definitions](https://conversionlab.app/docs/concepts/definitions) explain the fields used to group and measure your work.