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
Josh Clark
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Sam Proulx
Designing For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Changying (Z) Zheng
From prototype to production: Vibe coding design for real engineering systems
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Jim Kalbach
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Sara Conklin
Exit Interview: 20 Years of Tech, One Very Big Bet, and a Lot of Heat Pumps
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Benjamin Real
Maturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Daniel Korczynski
From generic to contextual research insights with AI | Live Q&A
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Harry Brignull
Beyond Clicks and Tricks: Why deceptive design has grown into a regulatory faultline
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Brianna Sylver
Lead With Purpose
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Kristin Wisnewski
Measuring What Matters
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Charlotte Vorbeck
Pipeline to Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
David Conrad
The Feeling of Data
2023 • Enterprise Community
Alla Weinberg
How to Build and Scale Team Safety
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Maggie Dieringer
Creating Consistency Through Constant Change
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold

More Videos

Kritika Sony

"AI can generate 3D models and geometry files, which you can directly import and print after careful checking."

Kritika Sony

Moving AI offscreen: Exploring failures, constraints, and recovery in physical game design

June 10, 2026

Jonathon Colman

"Content designers now have the same pay bands, equity grants, benefits as product designers – equal pay for equal results."

Jonathon Colman

How to Maximize the Impact of Content Design

January 8, 2024

Jilanna Wilson

"There's no such thing as over-communication when you're distributed; silence breeds assumptions."

Jilanna Wilson

Distributed DesignOps Management

February 26, 2019

Billy Carlson

"All major digital product frameworks have grid systems—use them to keep your layouts clean and consistent."

Billy Carlson

Pro-level UI Tips for Beginners

September 9, 2022

Jon Fukuda

"A large organization’s security protocols make AI adoption slower and more complex than in smaller groups."

Jon Fukuda Amy Evans Ignacio Martinez Joe Meersman

The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion

September 25, 2024

Victor Udoewa

"Awareness leads to feeling stuck because we don’t know what to do or don’t feel empowered to act."

Victor Udoewa

Beyond Methods and Diversity: The Roots of Inclusion

March 26, 2024

Dana Bishop

"In 2019, 74% of survey respondents relied mostly on in-person moderated interviews for UX insights."

Dana Bishop

2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact

March 11, 2022

Doug Powell

"We have over 140,000 IBMers who’ve completed design thinking online training."

Doug Powell

Closing Keynote: Design at Scale

November 8, 2018

Daniel Orbach

"Simplicity is the foundation of all complicated systems that work."

Daniel Orbach

Zero to One: Co-Creating Operating Models with your Team

September 23, 2024