A/B Testing

A/B Testing

What an introduction to this book. It starts with reference to the Obama campaign an how A/B testing was used to help drive results there. Wow. Got my attention. Then we get hit with a reference to the Optimizely product that the author helped create to try and offer A/B testing as a product as a lot of companies build something bespoke to manage it. You very quickly get the feeling that the author knows this subject very well

So I came in to this book with some background knowledge on what A/B testing is. For those who don't have that it's when you experiment with a few variations to a random sample of your user base. There has been an explosion on blog posts on this from many sources, one of the most telling for me has been LinkedIn who have put up a number. It seemed like A/B testing was one of the biggest tech buzzes of 2015 with a lot of companies really starting to share information about their proprietary implementations

A/B Testing is something that has really appealed to me in recent times since I started managing the UI Library team in work. I think the flexibility that comes with A/B testing sounds almost too good to be true and I would love to put that into the hands of our team. I also would love for us to be a little more metric driven, that makes me sound like a jerk manager... the fact still remains I would like a little more metrics in the day to day to help guide decisions and reflect on previous decisions.

When mentioning A/B testing before I was told by some colleagues that as we are an administrative website changing customer behaviour wasn't necessarily the most important thing to us. Our users NEED us  day to day to acheive something they have to do, this isn't a social media thing when the behaviour is optional and we're looking to encourage it. Our application suite is moving away from these administrative automation workflows and more into collaborative value add interactions. This changes the way we interact with our customer in some ways and as such I feel like A/B Testing
offers us something we NEED now.

This book offers a lot of insight in terms of getting organisational buy in and applying correct analysis of the data.My takeaway from this book was that if you want to do A/B testing then it's incredible important that you  know what you are looking to improve. What do you do? What are you looking to do? If you don't know that how can you create tests that will help you to that goal


Have you had any experience of A/B testing? I would love to hear from you on twitter or right here in the comments section!