101 UX Principles – 2nd edition - Second Edition

#5

Use A/B Testing to Test Your Ideas

We can learn a great deal from our users with interviews and feedback studies, but it’s hard to achieve a large scale with these techniques—it’s just too time-consuming to talk to 1,000 or 100,000 users. A/B testing (where you compare two designs) and multivariate testing (where you change multiple design elements), are a great way to gather results and test your designs with large audiences because they can be run by robots, not humans.

A/B testing is a technique that involves splitting a user base into two groups or populations and showing two different designs (“A” and “B”) to each group to see which design performs better. A/B testing gives the best results with larger populations of users; over 1,000 ...