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Bad management can certainly ruin things without A/B testing. It doesn't excuse A/B testing simply being a poor tool among all you have access to. Talking to
by throwaway290 4y ago
Bad management can certainly ruin things without A/B testing.
It doesn't excuse A/B testing simply being a poor tool among all you have access to. Talking to users and stakeholders, for example, provides infinitely more input. (Edit: yeah in many cases measuring what users do, directly watching or via analytics, is also useful.)
- noirbot 4y agoDefinitely - I'm not trying to say A/B testing is amazing, just that a lot of the comments have a strong "if you do A/B testing you're evil and are out to manipulate people" bent to them, which I think is too far in the other direction. Talking to people is great, but getting a representative sample is hard, and often people are bad at both understanding what they want, expressing it, or even being accurate about how they use things. I know when I was working closer to the UX side of the business before, I was constantly surprised by both what users would say they want AND by how users actually used the products. In my mind, A/B testing is good as a sort of "final pass" to serve as broad, semi-random validation that the change you're looking to make does actually do the thing that it's intended to do. It's not great for early on when you don't really know what to measure or look for, or if the change is remotely reasonable, but it can help check for if your focus group/user panel happened to be weirdly skewed in their usage/desires.