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
Joshua Graves
We Need To Talk: Managing Ludicrous Requests at Work (Part 3 of 3)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Maria Taylor
Knowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of the Design Org
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Roberta Dombrowski
5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Marc Rettig
The Urge to Migrate
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
John Calhoun
Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Florence Okoye
AfroFuturism and UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Maverick Chan
From Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Aiyana Bodi
Three Key Climate Initiatives and How You Can Help
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Intersection of Design and ResearchOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Aaron Stienstra
Leveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Yoel Sumitro
Actions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dave Malouf
The Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 2)
2022 • DesignOps Community
Peter Merholz
Customer-Centered Design Organizations
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Scott Plewes
Why Isn't Your UX Approach Going Viral?: A Mathematical Model
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold

More Videos

Amanda Kaleta-Kott

"I had to become my father’s vaccine angel navigating a digital experience that was harrowing even for me."

Amanda Kaleta-Kott Lea Martin, PhD

The Joys and Dilemmas of Conducting UX Research with Older Adults

March 11, 2022

Billy Carlson

"Audible’s cancellation process intentionally uses unclear structure and multiple primary buttons to slow users down — a dark pattern."

Billy Carlson

Pro-level UI Tips for Beginners

September 9, 2022

Wyatt Hayman

"Our research operations team’s mission is to let researchers focus on research without worrying about operational details."

Wyatt Hayman

Global Research Panels

August 8, 2020

Jaime Creixems

"Establish a design system council where all stakeholders gather regularly to maintain and evolve the system."

Jaime Creixems

Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System

June 7, 2023

Florence Okoye

"Storytelling became the root of the workshops because it helped everyone relate and respect each other’s experiences."

Florence Okoye

AfroFuturism and UX Research

March 27, 2023

"Users prefer the simpler and more delightful design even without usability testing."

How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"

June 15, 2018

Tricia Wang

"Linear perspective created the myth that one single perspective can represent objective truth, which led to many misunderstandings."

Tricia Wang

Spatial Collapse: Designing for Emergent Culture

January 8, 2024

Matt LeMay

"If only thinking is living in an ego-driven fantasy and giving someone more power than they have."

Matt LeMay

You Don’t “Get” Anyone to Do Anything

December 6, 2022

Jeff Gothelf

"If a new regime doesn’t value design, you’re still going to get design, it’s just going to suck."

Jeff Gothelf

The Intersection of Lean and Design

January 10, 2019