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
Victor Udoewa
Radical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Sofia Quintero
Beyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
How UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Alexandra Schmidt
Enterprise UX Playbook
2022 • Enterprise Community
Scott Stephens
The Next Generation in DesignOps Toolsets
2022 • DesignOps Community
Cheryl Platz
Embrace Your Fun Factor: Game Development Best Practices for Product Design
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Sara Asche Anderson
Not Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Jose Coronado
From Zero to Hero
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Verónica Urzúa
The B-side of the Research Impact
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Day 2 Panel
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Bria Alexander
Welcome
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jon White
Unsticking Research for Better Information Flow
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Dan Willis
Filling the Void
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Steve Portigal
Looking Back…to Look Ahead
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Lija Hogan
Three Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
2024 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Bryce Benton

"Find a mentor—an AI, a person, or a project—and use community resources like Open Austin to learn and grow."

Bryce Benton

[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library

June 4, 2024

Jen Cardello

"Democratization is about letting go of some research and enabling teams to learn from customers directly."

Jen Cardello Jennifer Otto

Learning Velocity—The Insights Speedometer

September 16, 2021

Hana Nagel

"Firsthand engagement with UX research shows that it doesn’t slow you down — it can actually help things move faster."

Hana Nagel

Turning Research Ripples into Waves

November 8, 2018

Luke Wroblewski

"People fall into two groups: some want to see what the system is thinking and why, others just want to see the final output."

Luke Wroblewski

Designing AI Applications

March 5, 2026

Amy Evans

"Starting with one line of business and showing success creates a trickle effect for broader organizational adoption."

Amy Evans

How to Create Change

September 25, 2024

Louis Rosenfeld

"Slack is growing steadily for us, but it’s hard to moderate and expensive at scale."

Louis Rosenfeld

The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld

June 5, 2024

Dave Malouf

"Design turns a 10 from an engineering team into an 11 or a 12; it turns up the volume much more."

Dave Malouf

Closing Keynote: Amplify. Not Optimize.

October 24, 2019

Brigette Metzler

"Conflicts caused by layers moving at different speeds actually keep things balanced and resilient."

Brigette Metzler

Scaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work

March 30, 2020

Louis Rosenfeld

"MJ Broadband saves our fingers some pain and some stress because we don’t have to take notes."

Louis Rosenfeld Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

March 27, 2023