User Experience

Tips and tricks of A/B testing

Guest Contribution

 |  Mar 4, 2017

The process of decision making in design has always been a hot area of discussion. Why do some designers make choices that others don’t, help and why do some designs seemingly work better than others? It’s all about one design against the other versions?—?A/B/n testing. The testing might be on an image, abortion a button, rx a headline, or beyond.

Why A/B testing?

The aim of A/B testing is to enable you to make incremental improvements to your website or app. By throwing your current website or app against one or more variations, you can constantly iterate your design and validate this with real users.

With A/B testing, each test generates new data about what has worked and what hasn’t. Every time something works, this can be included in the website or app and now forms a new and improved design.

Tips for A/B testing

When setting up a new A/B test, I recommend taking these things into consideration:

1. Be specific when deciding what to test. What do you expect to achieve if changes are adopted?
2. Choose the page on which you want to conduct the test, and then evaluate which A/B testing solution makes the most sense.
3. Set up two designs to test. Remember: one is the original and the other is the new design you think will improve the performance of the page, be it conversions, engagement or another metric. Don’t be afraid to test big changes, as they might just change the value of your webpage, leading to a significant impact on your business.
4. Track your test results. Most tools will give you a good comparison of the user experience data on each version of the design.
5. Don’t stop! Keep testing again and again, changing one element at a time. And even better if you test them at the early stages of the project.

Trends in A/B testing

I’ve come across several innovations in A/B testing that allow for a much greater degree of specification. Here are four interesting trends:

1. Mobile vs desktop experience.

Having a mobile friendly site for your company is obvious in today’s scenario. Having said that, the way visitors interact with a mobile site is quite different than how they interact with the same site when they’re using it from their desktop. Conduct A/B testing to check the differences in usage patterns and experience between mobile and desktop. Just as important, use A/B testing to check the habits of mobile users so that you can optimise your mobile site to promote the actions you’d like your users to take. Given the small screen size, which elements capture their attention? Where should you place your most important assets?

Heat maps are most helpful in figuring out these questions..

2. Website personalisation

Run tests based on personalized information or offers you are showing your visitors. Tailored content (based on assumptions about the way a visitor will behave) to elicit the feeling of a shopping or browsing experience is often a brilliant idea. You can run A/B tests to examine if the tailored content leads to more conversions or engagement.

3. Testing visitor behaviour:

At CanvasFlip, we often use session replays that make it very easy to understand the behaviour of the visitor. For example, if the visitor is moving through pages in a restless manner, or scrolling up and down the webpage frantically, you can assume they haven’t found what they are looking for and are not satisfied the page. With A/B testing, you can change the location of items on your page and then measure whether the test version led to a more successful session.

A/B testing is all about trying to improve your business results. In order to do this, you need to be focused on creating visitor journeys that are satisfying to the visitor, and will keep him or her coming back to your site. The combination of A/B testing together with other visual insights like session replays and heatmaps is the most effective way to measure how visitors are using your website and how successful they are in achieving their goals.