Improving your product is essential if you want to achieve long-term growth and profitability. The challenge is that improving a digital product involves a lot of subjectivity.
We all know examples of companies that have invested a lot of money and effort to redesign their website only to find out that users hate it. A/B testing is a framework that helps you make informed decisions based on user feedback.
In this article, we’ll review what A/B testing is and demonstrate how you can use it to optimize your products and features.
We’ll also implement a demo application in React Native, but you can easily adapt it to work on the web. We’ll run our example A/B test using Optimizely, one of the most popular split testing tools on the market.
Table of contents
- What is A/B testing?
- How to run an A/B test
- What should you A/B test?
- A/B testing example and demo using Optimizely
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing, or split testing, is a way to compare two or more versions of the same thing (e.g., a page, screen, text, feature, etc.) and determine which one performs better. It involves running experiments where we compare an existing variant (control variant) against a new variant (test variant).
How to run an A/B test
Here is what A/B testing looks like in practice:
- Build the control variant
- Randomly split the traffic; half of your users will still see the control variant while the other half will see the control variant
- Measure user interactions with both variants
- When you have enough data so that the experiment is statistically relevant, you analyze it and make a decision
- End the experiment and only keep the variant that performed better
A few important things to note here:
First, it is not mandatory to split the traffic into 50/50 percentages. It’s perfectly normal to send 90 percent of the traffic to the existing variant and only 10 percent to the new one.
Second, as mentioned above, you need enough data for the experiment to be statistically relevant. You cannot draw a conclusion based on a few interactions. Calculating statistical significance isn’t easy, but any A/B testing platform worth its salt (such as Optimizely) will compute this for you.
What should you A/B test?
Now that we understand how the process works, let’s review a few examples of things you can improve by A/B testing:
Content
Well-crafted content can help in driving more sales. The more content you create, the higher your chance to position high on the search results page for high-volume queries.
Common strategies companies use to create content at scale include:
- User-generated content
- Blog content
- Auto-generated content
When it comes to optimizing content, marketers often A/B test calls to action, page titles, subheadings, or any other relevant bits of content that might hook readers into, for example, signing up for a free trial of your product.
User interface
The user interface is one of the most commonly A/B-tested features of any product, app, or website.
Whether we’re talking about changing the color of a button or a complete application redesign, it’s a good practice to run an A/B test before committing to a plan of action.
Even if you think your UI looks good, your customers might have a different opinion.
Product changes
A/B testing is not only about testing the frontend of your product or service; you can also test different subscription models, prices, or other features.
Agile values and principles espouse embracing change. The environment is constantly evolving, and change is something we can use to our advantage.
To be competitive, not only should we anticipate change, but we should welcome it. A/B testing helps you validate whether changes to your app will attract more customers and/or enhance the user experience for existing customers.
Gradual roll-out
Let’s say you want to launch a new and fancy feature. The change is a big one, and you expect some friction.
Instead of rolling out this feature to everyone, you can A/B test it with a small percentage of the traffic. If everything works well, you are good to go. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.
Success will look different for different types of products/features. Learn more about how to measure success after a product launch.
Conclusion
There are numerous ways you can take advantage of A/B testing. A/B testing helps you make more informed, data-backed decisions around content and UI optimization, change management, product/feature roll-outs, and more.
Because it is so powerful and easy to implement, A/B testing is a must in today’s software development landscape.
The post What is A/B testing? Overview, examples, and Optimizely demo appeared first on LogRocket Blog.
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