| As a senior graphic designer / web developer: A/B testing is massively useful, but often misused in business. Commercially its become a bit of a buzzword. Which has led it being badly implemented. I think designers often get frustrated when A/B testing is applied to their designs post-brief. Designing a website for A/B testing purposes is a completely different brief. You are designing a toolkit for testing purposes. So that the next version will be informed. A/B is quite is lot more complicated than some people appreciate. Ive often seen people create two completely different designs and then sort of let them fight it out.
Yet they learn nothing from these experiments. There could of been elements that work well for certain persona's in each design! Fundamentally, designer can be quite precious. They don't like criticism like this. After all its impossible to measure all the factors and how does one measure 'creativity'. Plus some will feel like this lowers there input. why not just throw all the elements in bucket and see which comes up trumps. As a designer I love using this sort of testing. Design by data is a growing trend, that i think will get wider recognition. Sadly the A/B testing phase can create some slightly odd combination at first, but when you go back a re-design the page. You know its going to convert better. |