Rosenverse

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
Scott Jensen
Short Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Dave Hora
Research in the Face of Complexity: New Sensibility for New Situations
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Alicia D. Johnson
Disasters and the 21st Century
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Eric Shumake
An AMA on UX's Role in Healthcare
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building the Rosenbot
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Bethany Brown
Rewiring operations with service design and AI
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Joanna Vodopivec
One Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Bud Caddell
DesignOps Community Sensing Session
2021 • DesignOps Community
Frances Yllana
Theme 2 Intro
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Scher Foord
Turn the Ship Around: How to Apply Design Thinking Across Your Organization
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Michael Land
Establishing Design Operations in Government
2021 • DesignOps Community
Megan Blocker
Panel: Excellence in Impact
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Kat Vellos
Opener: The Other L Word
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold

More Videos

Carol Scott

"Trauma is a universal human experience."

Carol Scott Melissa Eggleston

Avoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices

February 5, 2025

Ariel Kennan

"We helped through Homestat last year to move 690 people into housing."

Ariel Kennan

Building a Design Culture

June 9, 2017

Noz Urbina

"Skills are modular tasks that bots can perform, triggered by specific commands or inputs."

Noz Urbina

Rapid AI-powered UX (RAUX): A framework for empowering human designers

May 1, 2025

Luke Roberts

"There is power in how you guide people’s attention, and where you draw system boundaries."

Luke Roberts Christian Bason, Ph.D. Amanda Woolley Ben Reason

Panel Discussion

December 4, 2024

Carol Massa

"Any change we make in healthcare can mean the difference between life and death, so timing is everything."

Carol Massa

Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences

December 3, 2024

Jose Coronado

"Results don’t speak for themselves. We have to speak for what we do or others will frame it for us."

Jose Coronado

From Zero to Hero

September 8, 2022

Aras Bilgen

"The value of research isn't in the methods or tools, it's in the researcher and the consultative relationship."

Aras Bilgen Ari Zelmanow

Research Democratization: A Debate

March 29, 2023

Amber Knabl

"Design for one extent to many is Microsoft’s inclusive design motto that guides effective accessibility."

Amber Knabl

Empowering innovation: The critical role of inclusive product development in the AI era

June 4, 2024

Bria Alexander

"If you have any tech issues or need customer support, #deogenerall.help is here to assist you throughout the conference."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

September 30, 2021