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
Catt Small
Craft a Vision that Actually Gets Shipped
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
John Taschek
Making People the X-Factor in the Enterprise
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Joerg Beringer
Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Smitha Papolu
Theme 3 Discussion
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Milan Guenther
The $212 billion ‘so what?’: unlocking impact in development cooperation
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Sam Ladner
Data Exhaust and Personal Data: Learning from Consumer Products to Enhance Enterprise UX
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Leisa Reichelt
Opening Keynote: Operating in Context
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Erin May
Distributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Kaitlin Tasker
Fast and Fearless Inclusive Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Adam Cutler
Discussion
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Ben Reason
Making the system visible: The fastest path to better decisions
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Aras Bilgen
Research Democratization: A Debate
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold

More Videos

John Cutler

"It is impossible to survive in this industry by pushing against the current all the time; you must put yourself in positions to leverage the current."

John Cutler

Oxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)

December 3, 2024

Darian Davis

"I felt on edge and physically depleted after our interactions."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Dave Gray

"If you have a feeling you’re having the same conversation over and over, a canvas like this can ratchet the conversation forward."

Dave Gray

Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps

November 7, 2017

John Cutler

"Executives only like things in threes, but if you do a three by three, you can get away with nine boxes—that's the max executive information processing."

John Cutler

The Alignment Trap

November 29, 2023

Abby Covert

"Just because you can color code something doesn’t mean you should."

Abby Covert

Stuck? Diagrams Help

October 27, 2022

Mark Interrante

"You can see our organization through the homepage of our site — we each owned a rectangle."

Mark Interrante

Collaboration Flows in Product Development

June 9, 2017

Devon Powers

"The future is not a toy. Accountability matters deeply in how we construct futures."

Devon Powers

Imagining Better Futures

March 9, 2022

Prayag Narula

"Design research—they need each other. They are much, much better together."

Prayag Narula

How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To

June 10, 2022

Peter Van Dijck

"Despite the worst user interface ever, cloud code is the most popular and successful agent that exists today."

Peter Van Dijck

Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people

October 22, 2025