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
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 2 Intro
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Tricia Wang
From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Michelle Bejian Lotia
Rolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Harry Max
Failure Friday #5: Lessons from a SaaS Design Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Alastair Simpson
Debunking the Myths of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Iulia Cornigeanu
QuantQual Book Club: Small Data
2024 • QuantQual Interest Group
Rachel Posman
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Melissa Eggleston
Practical People Skills for Building Trust on Teams and with Partners
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Caitlyn Hampton
Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Dave Malouf
The Future of DesignOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Dolly Parikh
Exit Interview #7: Journey of a Social Entrepreneur
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Deanna Zandt
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
2022 • Civic Design Community
Meghan Hellstern
The Next 100 Years of Civic Design: How Might We Better Rise to Meet the Challenges of Today and Tomorrow?
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Katy Mogal
But Do Your Insights Scale?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Kim Fellman Cohen
Measuring the Designer Experience
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Marc Rettig
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold

More Videos

Kristin Wisnewski

"Before, we never really looked holistically at decades of UX data—now we use it to be proactive and avoid duplicative studies."

Kristin Wisnewski

Measuring What Matters

October 23, 2019

Sarah Auslander

"A Facebook group became a primary communication channel where parents post both praise and complaints."

Sarah Auslander

Incremental Steps to Drive Radical Innovation in Policy Design

November 18, 2022

Louis Rosenfeld

"Peter van D**e really pushed us to think about the bot as part of a conversation, not just a query-response machine."

Louis Rosenfeld

The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld

June 5, 2024

Megan Blocker

"If you see a problem or opportunity, you should do something about it."

Megan Blocker

Getting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research

March 26, 2024

Caroline Vize

"Demand for user research is increasing dramatically, but design hiring is outpacing research hiring by 34%."

Caroline Vize

The State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022

March 9, 2022

Christopher Taylor Edwards

"The BICEPS model helps understand what our co-workers need to feel supported and purposeful."

Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie Roske

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

September 30, 2021

Eniola Oluwole

"The process was do what you want, I’m cool with that. Nobody really cared what others did, which created silos of indifference."

Eniola Oluwole

Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site

October 24, 2019

Caroline Jarrett

"A major error in many services is users creating multiple accounts because they can’t find or reuse existing ones."

Caroline Jarrett

Garbage in, garbage out? Measuring error rates to get ready for AI

January 8, 2026

Sam Proulx

"No company has a dominant advantage in AR/VR accessibility yet, but that will change in the coming years."

Sam Proulx

To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility

March 11, 2022