Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

When to Do A/B Testing

A/B testing is useful for comparing two or more designs and finding out which one works better. Generally speaking, there are two situations when this is useful:

• You’ve redesigned or rewritten something, and you want to know whether the new design or the new copy works better than the previous version.

• There are several possible solutions to a problem, and you want to find out which one works best.

You can use A/B testing to compare everything from vastly different layouts to small changes in color or wording.

If, like Google or Amazon, you have millions of people using your site every day, even minuscule differences in usability can result in tens of thousands of people either running into a problem or not. You probably ...