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 larger the dataset you work with, the more costly it is to run a single operation on AI models."
Daniel KorczynskiWhy AI Is Bad at Research (and how to make it actually useful)
March 10, 2026
"AI can serve as a conversational broker, helping non-designers interact naturally with design systems."
Louis Rosenfeld Billy Carlson Jon Fukuda Maria TaylorHow AI will Change DesignOps Tooling
October 3, 2023
"We want more practical case studies showing how specific teams approached problems and what they learned."
Ariel KennanCivic Design in 2022
January 13, 2022
"AI is both absolutely necessary and completely terrifying for science."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Llewyn Paine Nishanshi Shukla David WomackAI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
September 18, 2024
"It took me just a little bit amount of time to get into that and actually make a proper component from Figma."
Ryan Matthew Alex KurchevBridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
September 11, 2025
"I let my stakeholders have access to the list I’m analyzing along with links and short notes—it helps make the process more active."
Cara Maritz Rachel NyThe Art of Extrapolation
March 29, 2023
"Analytics and research should work closely to explain what is happening and why it is."
Renee BouwensLanding Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products
December 15, 2023
"Strategy is telling organizations what not to do, not just generating new ideas."
Mike Oren Janice WiitalaDesign Research Strategy & Strategic Design Research
February 3, 2022
"Breaking habits for new users, such as Mac users switching to Windows, requires mapping mental models carefully to reduce pain."
Paula BachImproving Legacy Software: How Much Better Does it Have to Be?
March 11, 2022