Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s 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
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?"
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The volume coming at me every day was like a week’s worth of work compressed into one day."
Indra KlavinsA Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World
October 23, 2019
"Many organizations treat researchers like glorified assembly line workers churning out disposable insights."
Sarah Fathallah Alba VillamilBeyond insights: Rethinking the role of researchers as stewards of organizational wisdom
March 13, 2025
"An ending occurs when the reality of your present moment shifts or changes all together."
Maria GiudiceEmpowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
March 13, 2025
"AI is not naturally testable in the same way as code; service design will become even more important."
Samuel ProulxInvisible barriers: Why accessible service design can’t be an afterthought
December 3, 2024
"There's no way to deny it: every industry needs to adapt to AI, but nobody really knows how yet."
Daniel KorczynskiWhy AI Is Bad at Research (and how to make it actually useful)
March 10, 2026
"We shifted UX Weekly to Product Design Biweekly, giving the team more time to engage meaningfully."
Briana Thomas Christina RodriguezWhen Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
September 30, 2021
"Soft skills often are a multiplier on your hard skills—they’re just as valuable, if not more so."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"Selma Blair partnered with Guide Beauty to design makeup easier to use for people with tremors."
Lija HoganPractical Principles of Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
"Accessibility is not a single project, it’s a journey that requires continuous iteration and improvement."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
September 8, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can non-developers generate production-useful prototypes without coding knowledge using AI tools like Cursor?
What are the four postures of intelligent AI interfaces defined in Sentient Design?
How can shared vocabulary help design practitioners better understand and communicate AI capabilities?