Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Ethics and Effective A/B Testing

Ethics and Effective A/B Testing

Facebook and OK Cupid have recently been under public scrutiny for the experiments they run on their users. The truth is every web site of a considerable enough scale experiments on their users. Whether it’s searching for just the right shade of blue for the “Buy!” button or trying out a new algorithm to perfect the news feed, these are psychological experiments and the user is the subject. In this talk, you’ll be introduced to the basics of solid, overlapping, multivariate testing as well as a simple tool for enabling those experiments. This will enable you to perform more, better, safer experimentation. This talk will also include a healthy discussion on the ethics of experimentation to help steer you away from any possible controversy.

Dusty Burwell

January 07, 2015
Tweet

More Decks by Dusty Burwell

Other Decks in Technology

Transcript

  1. :-o

  2. We may use the information we receive about you for

    internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement. EULA, who?
  3. Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide

    between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle. –Douglas Bowman