A/B testing doesn't lead to coherent thinking, which is essential to success in creative works. That is, you can run this test in precisely two places: In earl

A/B testing doesn't lead to coherent thinking, which is essential to success in creative works. That is, you can run this test in precisely two places: In early planning(what kinds of story do people want) and when adding finishing touches(alternative versions of a scene). Everything else has to come from self-feedback, a structural plan for what the novel "does": Does it explore certain themes? Does it go deep into a character's psyche? Is it a way to build up a world? Once you've set that plan, you have the tool you need to rubric yourself and determine what MUST be written(as in when you see a MUST in RFC specs) to satisfy the plan and what can be cut before it ever hits the page. And so most of the process never needs another person in the loop, it's just grinding through the technical details of how to make the story work given that spec. Seeking external advice is more counterproductive than not when you get into these details, because, as with the innards of coding, it's a spaghetti of dependencies that you can't get many "quick fixes" for. When we look at a software product, there's still a great(and probably underserved) need for that kind of structured rubric, but most of the work is biased towards delivering a high quality of service according to specific metrics, which is something that can be evaluated on a feature-by-feature basis. Often, in fact, the metrics get in the way of addressing the structural problem by creating conflicts of interest, especially when profit motive appears. That leads you towards, e.g. productivity tools that dark-pattern in some ads so that you misclick them.