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
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Christian Bason
Expand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges
2022 • Civic Design Community
Scott Jensen
Short Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Nathan Shedroff
Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Zariah Cameron
ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Ron Bronson
Design, Consequences & Everyday Life
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Kate Towsey
The State of ResearchOps: More Than Just Theory
2019 • DesignOps Community
Terry Buckman
Wargaming (An Introduction)
2023 • Enterprise Community
Steve Turbek
Designing Interactive Graphics with AI Code Help
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Ryan Rumsey
Business Influence Without Losing Your Soul
2021 • Enterprise Community
Uday Gajendar
Day 1 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Theme Two Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Emilia Åström
Unlock Your Team’s Intelligence with Collaboration Design
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Jobs To Be Done
2021 • Enterprise Community
Dagmara Kukawka
Tiny team, moonshot impact: Democratizing research across continents
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference

More Videos

Kate Towsey

"Operations is a verb. You’ve always been operating — the role just invites you to do it better."

Kate Towsey Jake Burghardt

ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt

October 16, 2025

Crystal Yan

"When you share a customer quote, the first layer is literal, but the goal is to dig deeper into what the customer is truly feeling."

Crystal Yan

Building a Customer-Centric Culture

March 30, 2020

Jason Mesut

"Leadership Dichotomies are not opposites but spectrums where leaders find their dominant position and comfort range."

Jason Mesut Martina Hodges-Schell Jose Coronado

Unmasking Design Leadership: Navigating leadership without neglecting ourselves

October 30, 2025

Lija Hogan

"Alan Cooper created personas to stop developers building features just because they're cool to build, not because users need them."

Lija Hogan

Contexts of Use: A Framework for Connection

December 9, 2021

Luke Roberts

"Designers have to be brave enough to speak truth to power, even when it’s uncomfortable."

Luke Roberts Christian Bason, Ph.D. Amanda Woolley Ben Reason

Panel Discussion

December 4, 2024

Leah Buley

"We’re not curing brain cancer here; sometimes perfect just has to be good enough."

Leah Buley Joe Natoli

Ask Me Anything with Leah Buley and Joe Natoli, co-authors of The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition)

October 8, 2024

Rebecca Buck

"Fit is an important question; it just needs to be reframed thoughtfully to avoid discriminatory connotations."

Rebecca Buck

Mission: Keep Talent in Research Roles!

March 10, 2021

Sheryl Cababa

"The solution isn’t just planting more trees—it’s understanding the historical urban design and policy layers behind it."

Sheryl Cababa

Integrating Systems Thinking Into Your Practice as a Designer

October 1, 2025

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Nothing about us without us is the mantra we embrace when doing inclusive design operations."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility

May 26, 2022