Rosenverse

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
Lisanne Norman
Why I Left Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
JD Buckley
Communicating the ROI of UX within a large enterprise and out on the streets
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Jennifer Bolduc
What's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion
2021 • DesignOps Community
Shipra Kayan
How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Yulya Besplemennova
[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Joerg Beringer
Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Julie Norvaisas
Back to basics, or start from scratch?
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Russ Unger
Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Deanna Zandt
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
2022 • Civic Design Community
Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa
Play to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Dan Mall
“Ask Me Anything” with Dan Mall, Author of Upcoming Rosenfeld Title, Design that Scales
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Christian Crumlish
Introduction by our Conference Chair
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Kit Unger
Theme 2: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Christopher Geison
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold

More Videos

Ian Swinson

"Communication matters—sending an email to an executive with spelling mistakes can ruin your respect."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Kate Towsey

"Research ops is like the most punk thing you can do in the experience design space."

Kate Towsey

Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey

April 2, 2025

Lisa Spitz

"Conducting retrospectives on research processes helps us identify bias, recruitment challenges, and improve methodology continuously."

Lisa Spitz Nikki Brand

Building Trust Through Equitable Research Practices

November 18, 2022

Elena Naids

"Early on, getting stakeholders to attend syncs felt like pulling teeth, but later it became their favorite meeting."

Elena Naids Liza McRuer

The Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space

October 2, 2023

Sam Proulx

"Most people with my assistive technology might learn to use the system at a different pace than non-disabled users."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

December 9, 2021

Bria Alexander

"You can access the digital swag bag by scanning the QR code or visiting fld.me/cd2022 for cool sponsor offers."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

November 17, 2022

Daniel Gloyd

"We as humans value warmth information in others more than competence information."

Daniel Gloyd

Warming the User Experience: Lessons from America's first and most radical human-centered designers

May 9, 2024

Cennydd Bowles

"Middle management often blocks collaboration despite desires from people underneath to work together."

Cennydd Bowles Dan Rosenberg Lisa Welchman

Day 1 Panel

June 4, 2024

Anna Poznyakov

"Our job is to make sure research conducted by non-researchers is objective, rigorous and unbiased."

Anna Poznyakov Richa Prajapati

Get The Most Out Of Stakeholder Collaboration—and Maximize Your Research Impact

March 12, 2021