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
Sarah Brooks
Theme 3 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Jorge Arango
[Demo] How to re-categorize content at scale using LLMs
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Nathan Shedroff
Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
John Calhoun
Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Greg Petroff
Exit Interview #1: Greg Petroff: From Silicon Valley Executive to Sonoma County Possibilitarian
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Bria Alexander
Day 3 Welcome
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Rusha Sopariwala
Remote, Together: Craft and Collaboration Across Disciplines, Borders, Time Zones, and a Design Org of 170+
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sandra Camacho
Creating More Bias-Proof Designs
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Noreen Whysel
Short Take #4: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Jilanna Wilson
Distributed DesignOps Management
2019 • DesignOps Community
Jack Behar
How to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Trisha Terhar
Empathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Dana Bishop
2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sarah Alvarado
How to make UX research leadership more effective [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Sam Proulx
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Screen Readers
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold

More Videos

Bryce Benton

"We don’t just want to hand over the data as a black box; we want to provide contextual information to preserve knowledge."

Bryce Benton

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

June 4, 2024

Dr Chloe Sharp

"Upskilling customer success managers and others to help with testing meant we could do far more research than I alone could manage."

Dr Chloe Sharp

Using Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities

November 29, 2023

JD Buckley

"Many teachers told us more than half their middle schoolers have first-hand experience with guns."

JD Buckley

Communicating the ROI of UX within a large enterprise and out on the streets

June 14, 2018

Patrizia Bertini

"Without data, we are just a person with an opinion — you can’t measure performance or impact without data."

Patrizia Bertini

DesignOps + KPIs = Measure your Impact!

January 8, 2024

Dave Malouf

"Without real business world experience, most leaders struggle with the overwhelming amount of demands placed on them."

Dave Malouf Adrienne Allnutt Jon Fukuda Dominique Ward

The Future of DesignOps

January 8, 2024

Yunyan Li

"We encourage everyone to think big first then trim down based on priorities and keep a backlog of good ideas."

Yunyan Li Anna Le Jen Kim

UX Best Practices

June 11, 2021

Billy Carlson

"What if prompts let you try things that might be messy or unrealistic but can inspire part of the final design."

Billy Carlson

Ideation tips for Product Managers

December 6, 2022

Satyam Kantamneni

"Taking time for visionary conversations is a mechanism to break out of incrementalism and incremental UX debt."

Satyam Kantamneni

Do You Have an Experience Vision?

March 23, 2023

Verónica Urzúa

"Sometimes turning off the camera in interviews helps participants feel more comfortable and open."

Verónica Urzúa Jorge Montiel

The B-side of the Research Impact

March 12, 2021