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
Aras Bilgen
Who does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Alnie Figueroa
Teamwork: Strategies for Effective Collaboration with Other Program Management Teams
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Sam Yen
Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Andrew Custage
The Digital Journey: Research on Consumer Frustration and Loyalty
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Bram Wessel
Enterprise Information Architecture
2020 • Enterprise Community
Victor Udoewa
Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Kayla Farrell
What It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Steve Portigal
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Bria Alexander
State of DesignOps Panel
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Megan Blocker
Day 2 Theme Panel
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Bill Scott
Lean Engineering: Engineering for Learning and Experimentation in the Enterprise
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Nicole Aleong
What UX research can learn from other research practices [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Joe Meersman
Use AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Vitorio Miliano
Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Carl Turner
You Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold

More Videos

Sylvie Abookire

"Mindfulness gives us space to bring curiosity and compassion to ourselves and others during conflict."

Sylvie Abookire Susan Abookire Caitlyn Nalder

A Civic Designer's Guide to Mindful Conflict Navigation

November 17, 2022

Joshua Graves

"Try to observe the situation like a security camera—stick to factual, objective descriptions."

Joshua Graves

We Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)

April 28, 2025

Aras Bilgen

"The app reads the question and prepares tutoring material, then helps solve it step by step or through chat if further questions remain."

Aras Bilgen

Who does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app

June 10, 2025

Jack Behar

"Component-driven prototyping means designing with coded UI components your development team already created."

Jack Behar

How to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product

December 6, 2022

Ian Swinson

"Your career is a design project. It’s the only one you own, so own it like you would a product."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Samuel Proulx

"If you think about the baby boomer generation, they are getting older, but their reliance on technology is not decreasing."

Samuel Proulx

Designing for Disability, Innovating for Everyone

March 11, 2025

Sam Proulx

"Mobile interaction with gestures and touch was revolutionary for accessibility."

Sam Proulx

Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World

September 8, 2022

Erin Hauber

"It’s up to designers to be the antidote, to articulate all these changes as one movement."

Erin Hauber

Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake

October 24, 2019

Kim Holt

"Values determine the team environment you create; they permeate through leadership and affect performance and happiness."

Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee Xiong

A Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps

September 8, 2022