Driving With Data
There are a lot of hands in the pot and eyes on the screen of steelcase.com. That site gets the most traffic and has the most stakeholders and content owners of all our web properties.
And rightfully so! It’s the big daddy!
With that comes a lot of ideas, questions and concerns about how to make the site better. This use to make my job difficult. Now it makes it thrilling.
I blogged about how I use user testing sessions to solve issues on the site with user feedback. Sometimes we have a singular smaller question, or we want to test an approach we’re not using today. Or sometimes we just need to look at the truth through data.
In those cases, I’ve been A/B testing.
A/B testing lets me compare two slightly different versions of a web page at the same time to see which one performs better. I manage a software that splits users visiting the site into seeing “experience A” or “experience B”, which usually vary as slightly as one different button color or text link.
After two to three weeks of split experiences, we usually have enough data to prove a winning experience.
Relying on user behavior puts the user in the driver seat of internal debates, and lets our opinions be opinions—not hard decisions. When we’re not sure what term to use, what color captures a user’s attention or where to put key information so users see it, we now test.
Manning the A/B testing software means I can step out of just-another-opinion-holder and into the role of consultant for content owners and cheerleader for users. Using this data to support changes means as a company we can be even more confident we’re delivering the best experience possible.
And rightfully so! It’s the big daddy!
With that comes a lot of ideas, questions and concerns about how to make the site better. This use to make my job difficult. Now it makes it thrilling.
I blogged about how I use user testing sessions to solve issues on the site with user feedback. Sometimes we have a singular smaller question, or we want to test an approach we’re not using today. Or sometimes we just need to look at the truth through data.
In those cases, I’ve been A/B testing.
A/B testing lets me compare two slightly different versions of a web page at the same time to see which one performs better. I manage a software that splits users visiting the site into seeing “experience A” or “experience B”, which usually vary as slightly as one different button color or text link.
After two to three weeks of split experiences, we usually have enough data to prove a winning experience.
Relying on user behavior puts the user in the driver seat of internal debates, and lets our opinions be opinions—not hard decisions. When we’re not sure what term to use, what color captures a user’s attention or where to put key information so users see it, we now test.
Manning the A/B testing software means I can step out of just-another-opinion-holder and into the role of consultant for content owners and cheerleader for users. Using this data to support changes means as a company we can be even more confident we’re delivering the best experience possible.