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
Samuel Martin
Co-Design vs Faux-Design: Navigating the Complexities of Sharing Power in Co-Design
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Ariel Kennan
Theme Two Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jess Greco
Claiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Jane Davis
Strategic Shifts and Innovations in User Research: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Joi Freeman
A New Vantage Point: Building a Pipeline for Multifaceted Research(ers)
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Deanna Smith
Leading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Bria Alexander
Day 3 Welcome
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Jorge Arango
The Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Dave Gray
Liminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Bill Scott
Lean Engineering: Engineering for Learning and Experimentation in the Enterprise
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Welcome
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Onur Kocan
Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Emily DiLeo
Stronger Together: Lessons Learned from UX Research Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
John Paul de Guzman
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
John Taschek
Making People the X-Factor in the Enterprise
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold

More Videos

Louis Rosenfeld

"Building a portfolio of talks, refreshed over time, lets you keep evolving and sharing your ideas in different formats."

Louis Rosenfeld Jemma Ahmed Christian Crumlish Uday Gajendar Chris Geison

Coffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation?

May 2, 2024

Corey Nelson

"This is a moment to rethink identity beyond UX and get creative with income streams and career paths."

Corey Nelson Amy Santee

Layoffs

November 15, 2022

Julia Cowing

"Product teams think in questions, not methods—that’s why a question-first framework is powerful and needed."

Julia Cowing

From Researcher to Builder: Vibe Coding Tomer Sharon's Method Finder

July 23, 2026

Bob Baxley

"We just have kind of a top of the funnel problem, you know, there’s not nearly enough people going into the field because not that many people know it exists."

Bob Baxley

Leading with Design Operations Past and Present

December 19, 2019

Jennifer Bolduc

"Covid proved people can work from anywhere, the real challenge is trust and managing that well."

Jennifer Bolduc Diane Gregorio Emily Day

What's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion

July 1, 2021

Mariah Hay

"I am known as that pain in the ass wherever I walk in, but you need those people who speak up and stand up."

Mariah Hay Marina Martin Husani Oakley Eduardo Ortiz

BUILD: Discussion

June 14, 2018

Onur Kocan

"Finding the balance between transformation and preservation is a delicate issue in Istanbul."

Onur Kocan Ayhan Ensici

Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul

November 16, 2022

Sam Proulx

"Remote testing helps get closer to real-world results because users are in environments customized for them."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

June 9, 2021

Melissa Schmidt

"Some of the same things that help you scale can also feel like they get in your way."

Melissa Schmidt Adam Menter

How UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas

June 4, 2019