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
David Cronin
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Jenny Price
From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
John Paul de Guzman
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Katie Hansen
Experimental research: techniques for deep, psychology-driven insights
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Taylor Jennings
Research Debate Club
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Fredrik Matheson
First-time users, longtime strategies: Why Parkinson’s Law is making you less effective at work – and how to design a fix.
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Dave Hora
Advice for Establishing Research
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Maggie Dieringer
Creating Consistency Through Constant Change
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Leah Buley
Closing Plenary: The Crisis of Digital
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Trisha Terhar
Empathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Michele Wong
Helping Them Help Us
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Billy Carlson
Tips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Luke Wroblewski
Designing AI Applications
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Lily Aduana
5 Reasons to Bring Your Recruiting in-House (and How To Do It)
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Kate Towsey
The State of ResearchOps: More Than Just Theory
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Fisayo Osilaja

"Using ChatGPT strategically increased my visibility and invited me into more strategic product meetings within my company."

Fisayo Osilaja

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

June 4, 2024

Theresa Slate

"Managers need to audit the feedback their team receives, not just accept it at face value."

Theresa Slate Erin Robertson

Why Changing Hearts & Minds Doesn’t Work When Promoting DE&I Efforts, but Checklists Do

October 4, 2023

Uday Gajendar

"Modernizing legacy platforms while maintaining a cohesive UX is a major challenge enterprises face."

Uday Gajendar

Theme 1: Introduction

June 9, 2021

Ashley Cortez

"There must be time to learn a community's history with government and time to build relationships to do this work well."

Ashley Cortez Devika Menon Nidhi Singh Rathore Danita J. Reese Mari Nakano

Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government

December 8, 2021

Rittika Basu

"Helper texts appear when hovering on unfamiliar features, explaining what buttons or controls do."

Rittika Basu

Age and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools

February 23, 2023

Alla Weinberg

"A relationship cycles through connection, disconnection, and repair, just like breathing has an inhale and an exhale."

Alla Weinberg

Cross-Functional Relationship Design

December 6, 2022

Marisa Bernstein

"Technology that includes everyone, especially those from vulnerable populations, ensures that what gets built will work for everyone."

Marisa Bernstein

It Takes GRIT: Lessons from the Small, but Mighty World of Civic Usability Testing

December 9, 2021

Ovetta Sampson

"Good UX and good design need not only to make a comeback but lead the way in this era of AI."

Ovetta Sampson

Managing the Human Engagement Risks of AI

June 10, 2025

Florence Okoye

"Afrofuturism breaks down and distorts the heretical notions of objectivity and disciplines haunted by coloniality."

Florence Okoye

AfroFuturism and UX Research

March 27, 2023