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
Catt Small
Moving from Execution to Strategy as a Designer
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Gabriela Barneva
Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Service Design
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
David Cronin
The GE Design System and Thoughts about Craft at Scale
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Patrick Neeman
Agent Standards Best Viewed in Every Assistant
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Kelly Goto
Emotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Carol Smith
Operationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA)
What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dave Hoffer
UX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Ryan Rumsey
Business Influence Without Losing Your Soul
2021 • Enterprise Community
Indi Young
Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
David Cronin
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Redefining the research toolkit: Expanding methodologies for a changing world
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Erin Malone
Understanding the past to prepare for the future
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Anna Poznyakov
Get The Most Out Of Stakeholder Collaboration—and Maximize Your Research Impact
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold

More Videos

Gillian Salerno-Rebic

"You can upload any asset like a Figma file or live URL and get AI persona feedback within about five minutes."

Gillian Salerno-Rebic Mark Micheli

From Insight to Impact: How JourneySpark Used WEVO Pulse + Pro to Drive a 50% Lift in Ad Engagement

June 11, 2025

Adrian Howard

"Design ops can help, but only if we can talk about it in ways that other people can hear."

Adrian Howard

Sturgeon’s Biases

September 25, 2024

David Cronin

"Creative conversations combined with material for quick prototyping let you get fast feedback on messy whiteboard ideas."

David Cronin Uday Gajendar Peter Morville Kendra Shimmell

Discussion

May 13, 2015

Peter Merholz

"Design systems raise the floor for quality and speed but on their own they have no soul and risk inhibiting innovation."

Peter Merholz

Design at Scale is People!

June 11, 2021

Bethany Brown

"Co-creation only works when it has boundaries."

Bethany Brown

Rewiring operations with service design and AI

November 20, 2025

Meghan Hellstern

"Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions."

Meghan Hellstern Joanne Dong

The Next 100 Years of Civic Design: How Might We Better Rise to Meet the Challenges of Today and Tomorrow?

December 10, 2021

Patrick Boehler

"The careful application of structured queries can reveal deeper insights than traditional research alone."

Patrick Boehler

Fishing for Real Needs: Reimagining Journalism Needs with AI

June 10, 2025

James Chudley

"The obsession with precise carbon calculations is less helpful than focusing on relative impact to guide improvements."

James Chudley

Decarbonising User Journeys: How minimising enables us to do more with less

February 19, 2025

Lori Muszynski

"If you start launching design systems without having got your culture in place, you’re basically just turning the design team into a factory."

Lori Muszynski Peter Merholz

Keeping Design Weird

October 2, 2023