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
Uday Gajendar
Theme 1: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Prayag Narula
How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Jen van der Meer
Service design performs value
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Convergent Research Techniques in Customer Journey Mapping
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Charlotte Lee
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Maria Rosala
Research Repositories
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Nova Wehman-Brown
We've Never Done This Before
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
Frameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
You’ve got Gold! A Rosenverse demo with Lou Rosenfeld
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Matteo Gratton
Can Data and Ethics Live Together?
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Kyria Stephens
Power to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jeff Sussna
What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Elana Chapman
Getting started with accessibility research
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Chris Geison
What is Research Strategy?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Deirdre Hirschtritt
Research is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Dantley Davis
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
2020 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

Jeff Sussna

"The digital is infusing the physical and breaking down familiar boundaries between parts of our lives and systems."

Jeff Sussna

What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps

November 6, 2017

Indi Young

"Most technology research is not research at all but at best focus group testing, and often lacks ethics."

Indi Young

Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young

December 12, 2019

Bria Alexander

"Please read our code of conduct; we want to ensure everyone feels safe and respected in this community."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

June 9, 2021

Joy KendiMwiti

"We built the reporting assistant on WhatsApp because parts of their workflow were already happening informally on such channels."

Joy KendiMwiti

Deciding when to automate: Integrating AI in high-stakes systems

June 9, 2026

Sean Dolan

"If a journey map is living and used, revisit it every three months to check if it still reflects reality."

Sean Dolan

A Practical Look at Creating More Usable Enterprise Customer Journeys

October 31, 2019

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"When we start being intentional about inclusion, we gain clarity in Design Ops."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Theme Three Intro

September 9, 2022

Shazia Ali

"Often we intend to be a host, but act more like a butler by backing away during the conversation."

Shazia Ali Bruce Gillespie Joyce Lee Andy Warr

Communication: Innovative techniques for making your voice heard [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

August 21, 2024

Sharon Bautista

"One thing all the industries we interviewed have in common is a reliance on PDFs and printing."

Sharon Bautista

Time to Make the Donuts: How User Research Helped Bridge Disparate Teams

January 8, 2024

Veevi Rosenstein

"Having a back office support in place made it much easier to convince new researchers to join the team."

Veevi Rosenstein

Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice

January 8, 2024