Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
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?"
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Emotion is the new brand value; trust is earned over time and emotional connection drives loyalty."
Kelly GotoEmotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
May 13, 2015
"Designers should be the voice that stabilizes that wonky table helping our teams, our clients, our organizations to survive and to thrive in this period of heightened uncertainty."
Tim ParmeeChanging Our Design Pressure Points
October 2, 2023
"I really don’t like when we design our systems so well, because it makes the consumer think they might want it, and so they take too long to decide they actually didn’t want it."
John MaedaMaking Sense of Enterprise UX
June 9, 2016
"Executive commitment, like IBM’s hundred million dollar investment, is essential to building design as a deep organizational practice."
Peter MerholzDesign at Scale is People!
June 11, 2021
"Web3 offers a unique chance to get involved early before some of the ethical challenges of Web2 take root."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"The Rosen Bot is narrow in scope, just UX and product design content that's super high quality."
Louis RosenfeldGenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion
June 11, 2025
"There’s this inflection point about how research work is done and what the system wants from knowledge workers."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Steve Portigal Alba Villamil Sam LadnerThe Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
July 29, 2021
"Pilots don’t need to be perfect, they just need enough moving parts to gather useful feedback quickly."
Kim Fellman CohenMeasuring the Designer Experience
October 23, 2019
"The unsung hero of Enterprise UX isn’t the user or the researcher or the designer — it’s the person drowning in emails, Excel sheets, and project plans."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 8, 2016
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What are de-risking sessions in service design and how do they help prepare stakeholders for co-creation?
Why is the traditional output-focused approach risky in uncertain and fast-changing markets?
What are practical ways to practice learning and experimentation in daily work without formal programs?