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
Samuel Proulx
Designing beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Dominique Ward
The Most Exciting Time for DesignOps is Now
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Ryan Matthew
DesignOps without Boundaries: Building More with What You Have
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Mike Brzozowski
UX in everyday products: Empowering climate conscious choices
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Kelly Goto
Emotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Brigette Metzler
Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Clara Kliman-Silver
UX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Jon White
Unsticking Research for Better Information Flow
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Enterprise Community
Terry Buckman
Wargaming (An Introduction)
2023 • Enterprise Community
Erika Flowers
AI-Readiness: Preparing NASA for a Data-Driven, Agile Future
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Emily Williams
When UX Research and Institutional Racism Collide: A Case Study
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Ian Johnson
Latent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Jake Burghardt
Stop wasting research: Unlock more value from research insights
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Bob Baxley
Leading with Design Operations Past and Present
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Kevin M. Hoffman

"Content is created all over and inconsistently; leadership needs to see content as the fuel driving the experience."

Kevin M. Hoffman

Theme 2: Enterprise Team Journey

June 3, 2019

Carl Turner

"Decision making here is basically forge trading — people argue and withhold support until they get what they want."

Carl Turner

You Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project

March 28, 2023

Bria Alexander

"Please be nice, respect each other, and carry yourself as if you were at your day job."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

June 10, 2021

Paul Pangaro, PhD

"Conversation is 21st century design; it's how we share values, align intentions, and coordinate action."

Paul Pangaro, PhD

Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations

June 6, 2023

Amy Marquez

"Creating internal champions in client organizations helps improve adoption and reduces churn."

Amy Marquez

INVEST: Discussion

June 15, 2018

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"Discomfort should not be dismissed; it’s a signpost for necessary change."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

The power to heal and harm

March 13, 2025

Lija Hogan

"You need a thoughtful operation managing your democratization program to keep it on track and adaptable."

Lija Hogan

Doing more with more: Lessons from the Front Lines of Democratization

March 9, 2022

Allan Lowson

"We went from stitching wireframes to actually designing in code—no more simulacra."

Allan Lowson

Rehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping

June 9, 2026

Louis Rosenfeld

"Bria is the bringer of dad jokes and the glue of the conference."

Louis Rosenfeld Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

March 27, 2023