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
"When AI got it wrong, it did so in ways that matter operationally, skipping required compliance or assuming outdated workflows."
Snehal PendharkarConducting pre-research with AI agent personas: Pressure-testing concepts for expert workflows
June 10, 2026
"There’s been a fundamental shift in consumer products in the last five years driven by machine learning."
Sohit KarolDesigning Delightful Listening Experiences: Mixed Methods Research in the Age of Machine Learning
March 31, 2020
"If you can describe your idea clearly enough that someone else could build it, you can have AI build it for you."
Rikki TeetersConcept to code: Transforming ideas into functional products with Kiro
June 10, 2026
"Democratization is becoming more of an umbrella term with different customers using it to mean very different things."
Trisha TerharEmpathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
March 10, 2022
"At Atlassian, many confident non-researchers were already doing lots of research, which was an opportunity and a challenge."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"Our code of conduct is not window dressing; it’s the front end of a process to keep everyone safe."
Louis RosenfeldWelcome / Housekeeping
June 6, 2023
"What if it’s all a hoax and we just invented a better world for no reason? That’s a good place to be."
Louis Rosenfeld Matt Jones Olga Khroustaleva Michael Leggett Karol MunozDo you want to work on climate? (Climate UX Discussion Series)
November 15, 2023
"We need to harness the power of citizens to make real change."
Ali Jeffery Sheri ChudowHow DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
October 22, 2020
"What exactly did you observe that makes you say that? What past experience let you think that way?"
Lin NieWhen Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
March 10, 2021