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.
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
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
"Increasing page load time by three seconds can nullify all your design improvements."
Erin WeigelUX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests
July 10, 2024
"I helped a company save 12 million dollars by not investing in an iris scanner in a one-week project."
Mike OrenWhy Pharmaceutical's Research Model Should Replace Design Thinking
March 28, 2023
"UX researchers should learn Python or R and how to leverage AI APIs to process unstructured data."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"Prompt injection attacks can trick AI agents into accessing private data like emails without the user realizing."
Heidi TrostWhen AI Becomes the User’s Point Person—and Point of Failure
August 7, 2025
"The studio is designed for whole teams to work together, not just the design team alone."
Adam CutlerPeople + Places + Practices = Outcomes
June 8, 2016
"Localization of content is essential because language barriers affect older adults globally."
Rittika BasuAge and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools
February 23, 2023
"One superpower of ops humans is making problems and gaps visible to build awareness and drive change."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"It’s about us, the design ops practitioners, and what we need today to be better at our jobs."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
October 3, 2023
"I don’t know what I don’t know – new practitioners may not even realize what questions to ask at first."
Laine Riley Prokay Lisa GordonCarving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
September 9, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How have changes in communication technologies historically affected collective knowledge building, and what might AI's role be?
How is the role of research operations evolving with AI and broader data integration?
What does a successful healthcare UX career look like in terms of accumulating influence and aligning with clinical/business goals?