Rosenverse
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact

Wednesday, July 24, 2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
Speakers: Erin Weigel
Link:

Summary

Experimentation can be intimidating to non-data science folk. But Erin wants to get everyone excited about A/B testing. In this talk, Erin shares the Conversion Design process. It centers A/B testing as a way to gather high-quality evidence to make highly informed decisions to improve your digital product. She also introduces the Good Experimental Design toolkit. These easy-to-follow templates usher teams through the logic needed to design trustworthy experiments that you can learn from.

Key Insights

  • Conversion design combines design, science, and business to intentionally create measurable improvements, not just arbitrary changes.

  • Ronald Fisher’s 1919 work exposed how poor experimental design led to decades of unreliable scientific data.

  • Conversion originates from the Latin word meaning to transform or change, which is broader than just sales or profit.

  • Traditional linear product development processes miss the complex, iterative nature of real-world systems.

  • Systems thinking offers a more accurate way to understand and manage design experiments within interconnected environments.

  • A rigorous conversion design process includes seven phases: understand, hypothesize, prioritize, create, test, analyze, and decide.

  • Experiments grounded in well-documented hypotheses based on research have higher success rates than guesses.

  • Randomized 50/50 AB testing is the gold standard for isolating the true effect of design changes by evenly distributing confounds.

  • Experimentation buckets—product foundations, content/motivation, accessibility/usability, and bug fixes—help prioritize work effectively.

  • Ethical considerations and guardrail metrics are crucial to ensure changes benefit all stakeholders sustainably and without manipulation.

Notable Quotes

"Conversion means change, not just sales or profit."

"Design is the rendering of intent — bringing ideas into form that solve the problem."

"Decades worth of agricultural experimental data was garbage because of poor experimental design."

"Most product teams stay on the bottom rungs of evidence, relying on opinions or observational data instead of randomized trials."

"You can never purely test an idea, only the implementation of the idea."

"Randomization is magic — it evenly distributes confounds so the observed effect is caused by your change."

"Not all changes create value; some do nothing or even make things worse."

"You have to think critically about how a change impacts all stakeholders, not just the main business metric."

"Ethics evolve faster than laws; just because something is legal doesn’t make it ethical."

"If an experiment I design made the front page news tomorrow, how would I feel about it?"

Ask the Rosenbot
Asia Hoe
Partnering with Product: A Journey from Junior to Senior Design
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Smitha Papolu
Theme 3 Discussion
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Marissa Cui
Climate Design Product Showcase
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Mansi Gupta
Drawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jenny Price
From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Ben Davies
Expert Panel: The Principles of Research Repository Design
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jill Fruchter
Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher's Role is to Stay Curious
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Dianne Que
Real Talk: Proving Value through a Scrappy Playbook
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Gretchen Anderson
Scaling the Human Center
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Verónica Urzúa
The B-side of the Research Impact
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Jack Moffett
UX Metrics That Matter and The Future of our Design at Scale Conference: A Community Conversation
2022 • Enterprise Community
Shanti Mathew
Civic Design at Scale: Introducing the Public Policy Layer Cake
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Sofía Delsordo
Public Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Ned Gartside
Navigating accessibility and climate
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Erin Hauber
Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold

More Videos

Sarah Fathallah

"Community advisory boards were elected by their peers to review findings and ensure accuracy."

Sarah Fathallah

Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities

March 30, 2020

Sheryl Cababa

"AI tools today are sandwiches in search of picnics—useful, but lacking killer applications yet."

Sheryl Cababa Ethan Marcotte Milena Pribic

Day 2 Panel

June 5, 2024

Nova Wehman-Brown

"Be the one who says I don’t know too. Be the one who picks up the sharpie first."

Nova Wehman-Brown

We've Never Done This Before

June 4, 2019

Dana Chisnell

"Every time you bring a teammate into a research session, you’re scaling change."

Dana Chisnell

The Sensemaking Business

March 10, 2026

Liza Pemstein

"I want to encourage excitement about research and gradually mold people into better researchers."

Liza Pemstein Jane Davis

Scaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever

March 27, 2023

Frances Yllana

"Power is liquid — you might have it in one space and not in another."

Frances Yllana Ann Buechner Jess Jones Betsy Ramaccia

D.E.A.R.R. Diaries (Discipline, Experience, Architecture, Reflection + Revolution)

November 16, 2022

Nathan Curtis

"You have to treat the design system like a product that everyone in your organization will use."

Nathan Curtis

Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products

June 9, 2016

Jim Kalbach

"Experience mapping brought a new understanding that helped us draw former extremists into peace efforts."

Jim Kalbach

Peace is waged with sticky notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences

June 14, 2018

Edward Cupps

"A principal has built a boat on their own and rode it around the world—demonstrating autonomy and expertise."

Edward Cupps

The Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor

June 11, 2021