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
Christian Crumlish
From tools to staff: What the next generation of agents means for the future of design
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Catt Small
How the most senior designers are using AI in their work right now
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Emily Danielson
“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 1: The new product journey
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Cara Maritz
The Art of Extrapolation
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Rachel Radway
The Many Paths Of Design Operations
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Theme 2 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Daniel Gloyd
Designing Warmth
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Robin Beers
Research as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Mariah Hay
BUILD: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Aras Bilgen
Who does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Cheryl Platz
Embrace Your Fun Factor: Game Development Best Practices for Product Design
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Catherine Dubut
Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design
2021 • Enterprise Community
Laureen Kattan
Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Russ Unger
Getting Out from Under Everyone: How to Escape the Paralysis of Getting Started
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Edgar Anzaldua Moreno
Using Research to Determine Unique Value Proposition
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold

More Videos

Crystal Philcox

"There was zero UX experts at the IRS, not even a job description for that role."

Crystal Philcox

The Many Faces of Operations

November 6, 2017

Amy Brana Stuart

"We started a human-centered design passport training to empower local staff to engage in research."

Amy Brana Stuart

Rest in Peace Fly-in-fly-out Design

June 9, 2022

Victor M. Gonzalez

"We fight perfectionism by doing enough with the time we have, then shipping the work."

Victor M. Gonzalez

Practicing Learners and Learning Practitioners

March 10, 2021

Sheryl Cababa

"Mapping is not just for presentation; it’s a practice to evolve your understanding of a complex problem space."

Sheryl Cababa Alexis Oh

Thinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa

June 12, 2024

Caitlyn Hampton

"The agents are brutally honest with their feedback, which helps us prioritize features that actually matter to them."

Caitlyn Hampton Monica Lee Jina Yoon

Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World

June 11, 2021

Peter Van Dijck

"We invented the ‘prompt deep dive’ technique to spend lots of time on one prompt to deeply understand it."

Peter Van Dijck

Building the Rosenbot

June 4, 2024

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Nothing about us without us – we need to involve people with disabilities throughout research, design, and testing."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Inclusive Design is DesignOps

September 29, 2021

Louis Rosenfeld

"Imagine a world where research bots at IBM talk to the Rosen bot to give you better guidance on interpreting research."

Louis Rosenfeld

The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld

June 5, 2024

Dave Hoffer

"The introvert’s edge is that they research, plan, and have a strategy for meaningful conversations."

Dave Hoffer Joanne Weaver

UX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer

May 21, 2025