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
Molly Fargotstein
Multipurpose Communication & UX Research Marketing
2019 • DesignOps Community
Sara Conklin
Exit Interview: 20 Years of Tech, One Very Big Bet, and a Lot of Heat Pumps
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Anna Nguyen
Why Our Voice of the Customer is Better Than Yours
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Anupama Dhareshwar
From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Vasileios Xanthopoulos
A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach to User-Centric Maturity at Scale
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Noel Lamb
Cultivating Business Partnerships to Grow Research Ops
2022 • Advancing Research Community
John Calhoun
Have we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Trauma-Responsive Design: Reimagining the Future of Design Now
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Healing Toxic Stress
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Briana Thomas
When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sarah Alvarado
How to make UX research leadership more effective [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Chris Geison
Theme Two Intro
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Ashley Sewall
Exit Interview #5: Designing My Life After Tech
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Alexandra Schmidt
Why Ethics Can't Save Tech
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Carol Massa
Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Anat Fintzi
Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold

More Videos

Nathan Curtis

"Visual style isn’t just enough to make something feel cohesive."

Nathan Curtis

Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products

June 9, 2016

Ricardo Martins

"Customers can answer what the researcher wants to hear in surveys, making attitude only 28% predictive of real behavior."

Ricardo Martins

Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods

March 12, 2025

Maria Giudice

"I treat everything in life as if it’s a design problem."

Maria Giudice

Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience

June 9, 2016

Catherine Blizzard

"The proof came from delivering the output — stakeholders stopped questioning the process once they saw the quality research."

Catherine Blizzard

Using Integrated Insight to Drive Growth

March 10, 2022

Sandra Camacho

"White supremacy is the belief system of the superiority of whiteness embedded in systems, including algorithms."

Sandra Camacho

Creating More Bias-Proof Designs

January 22, 2025

Rachel Posman

"Designers deserve support and infrastructure so they can really excel in their work."

Rachel Posman John Calhoun

"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors

September 25, 2024

Dan Donald

"Everyone seems to have a design system, but many don’t understand why they need one."

Dan Donald

Design Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change

June 1, 2023

Vanessa Varin

"Feedback is more like an investment and a contribution into not just the person's work, but also to their growth."

Vanessa Varin

Feedback: The Other F-Word

September 10, 2025

Jacqui Frey

"Design Ops brings the joy back into design."

Jacqui Frey

Scale is Social Work

March 19, 2020