Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments

by Erin Weigel, Stuart Frisby (Foreword by), Lukas Vermeer (Foreword by)

Overview

Design for Impact is a down–to–earth A/B testing guide. It features the Conversion Design process to operationalize effective experimentation in your company. In it, Erin Weigel gives you practical tips and tools to design better experiments at scale. She does this with self–deprecating humor that will leave you smiling—if not laughing aloud. As a bonus, The Good Experimental Design toolkit presents everything you learn into step–by–step process for you to use each day.

Who Should Read This Book?

If you're a curious person working in tech who wants to deliver impactful work, you should read this book. If you're a business leader looking to help your team make better decisions, you should read this book. If you want to level–up your approach to experimentation, you should read this book. In short, everyone—from CEOs to marketers, engineers, product people, through to designers and content folks—should read this book.

Takeaways

• Learn a fun, balanced approach to digital product experimentation to get your whole team testing customer–centric ideas.
• Stop making changes and start making improvements with the Conversion Design process.
• Follow the Good Experimental Design toolkit so that you and your entire team design for impact together.
• Clear up confusion around A/B testing with helpful tools and practical advice.
• Look for loads of actionable tips for effective product experimentation to give your team insight into the big picture.
• Make the complex math behind why experimentation works easy and understandable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959029373
Publisher:	Rosenfeld Media
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Erin Weigel is a principal designer and senior design manager. She has a Bachelor’s degree in fine art painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and she has studied at Konstfack UniversityCollege of Art & Design in Stockholm, Sweden.Her career began with waiting tables and working retail. She eventually worked her way up to Principal Designer at Booking.com (BKNG), the world’s largest online travel company. She’s worked in many different roles within product teams. She’s spent time as a product manager of data science, a developer building websites and coding up emails, and she is currently a Senior Design Manager at Deliveroo. While at Booking.com, Erin designed and coded more than 1,200 A/B tests. She analyzed and learned from thousands more. Her unique approach to product design and development combines a service mindset, customer-centric thinking, and A/B testing to deliver highly converting products that customers love. Nowadays, she shares what she learns about design and experimentation at conferences and workshops around the world. You can follow her on LinkedIn at www.LinkedIn.com/in/ErinDoesThings or visit her personal website at www.ErinDoesThings.com for more information.

Editorial Reviews

"A must-read if you're into winning arguments with hard facts and transforming your ideas into undeniable success stories."
—Janna Bastow, CEO and Co-founder, ProdPad

"Design for Impact makes "brain–breaking" maths fun and intuitive. Through practical examples backed up by comprehensive explanations of the underlying theory, it will help you run good experiments."
—Liam Furman, Data Scientist, Experimentation Consultant
www.LiamFurman.com

"Learning through trial and error takes too long and costs too much. Instead, learn from these hard–won lessons from a practitioner with more than a decade of experimentation experience."
—Peep Laja, CEO at Wynter

"An awesome, practical guide for teams looking to use experimentation to grow their online businesses. It works!"
—Darren Huston, CEO, BlackPines Capital Partners and former CEO, Booking.com

From the Publisher

2024-07-01
Weigel offers a one-stop guide to improve product design for customers.

In her nonfiction debut, the author, a senior design manager, shares tips and strategies for product development based on the overall framework of “Good Experimental Design,” which she describes as a way to move the whole process “beyondopinion”: “It uses research, A/B testing, and data analysis to create reliable evidence, which enables consistently better decision-making.” Objective evidence is at the heart of what Weigel refers to as “Conversion Design,” which rests on three key elements: Design, Science, and Business. “Accessibilityis if something ispossible to do,” she writes; “Usabilityis if something iseasy to do.” In these pages, she offers a wide-ranging approach to aligning both. The author covers basic terminology (“contrary to popular belief, the idea behind hypothesis testing isnotto prove the alternate hypothesistrue,” she writes. “It is to be extremely skeptical of the alternate hypothesis and assume the null hypothesis is true”), explains what makes some experiments effective, and details concepts like controls, randomization, and experimental variables. The book is lavishly illustrated with graphs, charts, colorful visuals, and highlighted insets on subjects such as “Expert advice from the field.” From fundamentals to more specialized topics like work processes and stakeholder responsibilities, Weigel is an energetic, absolutely winning guide. “I’ve lived about a hundred lives in my short time on this planet,” she writes, and readers will believe it—these pages brim with lessons learned from experience and hard-earned wisdom. There’s no such thing as one “right” decision in experimentation, the author cautions, and in the world of Conversion Design, seeming paradoxes abound: Processes can be efficient but not effective, workers can be productive but not efficient, and so on. With tremendous engagement and clarity, Weigel explains it all.

A wonderfully readable field guide to making better designs and getting better end results.

Kirkus Reviews