Author: Martin P.
Title: Content Marketer
EP 31: How To Engage The Community And Create a Culture Around Experimentation?
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work — Jeff Bezos
A warm welcome to newcomers and revolutionary veterans to another episode of Experimental Revolution. Where we celebrate the best experimentation podcasts, blueprints, opinions, and blog posts. Let’s see:
This Week in Experimentation:
Blueprint of the week: How to engage the community and create a culture around experimentation? Improve engagement, training, feedback, and inputs of your tests. Link.
Talk of the week: Colin Crowell, Manuel da Costa, and the show’s host, Guido X Jansen, will help you learn what separates good from great experimentation programs and how you can take yours from former to later. Link.
Read #1: The Psychology of Design — To improve your user experience, you need to understand the biases & heuristics affecting how the user interacts with your product. Link.
Read #2: GA4 Migration Step-by-step Guide — GA4 migration isn’t a simple process. It has lots of pitfalls that can make you lose waste time or data. Link.
Read #3: Empathic Design: Mapping Your Brain, Brand, and Data — helps explore brand perceptions and user motivations and teases out some of the unconscious factors that go into consumer decision-making. Link.
Opinion of the week: Alex Birkett — I cut my teeth in content at CXL in 2015 and still carry many of the core lessons I learned there into my work. Link to the original post.
Event of the week: Scaling an Experimentation Program at an Australian cosmetics e-retailer — Walk away with tools and processes you can implement right away. Explore how an Australian online cosmetics retailer scaled its program, kept winning, and increased testing velocity. Link.
Blueprint of the Week: How to engage the community and create a culture around experimentation?
What are ways to engage the community and create a culture around experimentation?
What works to change people and ways of work is different depending on the organization. We need to experiment with ways to engage and train our teams.
If you create a culture around experimentation, you can make it more accessible and enjoyable for people of all backgrounds to become involved in the process of discovery and exploration.
Use Cases:
— increasing engagement and inputs into a testing program
— getting feedback for testing efforts
— training and education on testing principles
Talk of the Week: What separates good from great experimentation programs?
Colin Crowell, Manuel da Costa, and the show’s host, Guido X Jansen, will help you learn what separates good from great experimentation programs and how you can take yours from former to later.
You’re passionate about experimentation. Excited. You want things to change.
But what you want to happen and what’s actually happening are two different things.
How do you solve this?
What’s going on?
Why do you have these irreconcilable situations where experimentation is fantastic and you wanna be known as the next Netflix, but nothing seems to be moving forward?
1 great test doesn’t make a great testing program.
Reads of the Week:
Read #1: The Psychology of Design
Every time users interact with your product, they:
🙈 Filter the information
🔮 Seek the meaning of it
⏰ Act within a given time
💾 Store bits of the interaction in their memories
So to improve your user experience, you need to understand the biases & heuristics affecting those four decision-cycle steps.
In the article, you’ll find a list of cognitive biases and design principles (with examples and tips) for each category. Let’s dive right in. Link to article.
Read #2: GA4 Migration Step-by-step Guide
GA4 migration isn’t a simple process. It has lots of pitfalls that can make you lose waste time or data.
Google Analytics 4 is not a mere redesign of Universal Analytics, it’s a brand-new product. While it does offer a lot of the same functionality, it’s also doing things quite a bit differently — from its interface and available metrics to the way it quantifies the data collected.
To help you go through the migration process easier, we have created this helpful step-by-step guide that covers the following:
Is this GA4 Migration Guide for You?
How to Back Up Your Data from UA
How Long Does It Take To Switch from UA to GA4?
A Step-By-Step Guide to Google Analytics 4 Migration
Read #3: Empathic Design: Mapping Your Brain, Brand, and Data
What’s the best way to increase conversions? Apart from basic usability fixes, aligning your messaging and design with your users’ motivations is a good bet.
Problem is, discovering user motivations is one of those things that is much easier said than done.
There are, however, research techniques that purport to do just that.
Empathic design is one such technique, an underutilized facet of qualitative research.
It can do wonders in discovering brand perceptions and user motivations and teasing out some of the unconscious factors that go into consumer decision-making.
Opinion of the Week:
— By Alex Birkett
“I cut my teeth in content at CXL in 2015 and still carry many of the core lessons I learned there into my work.
A few of them:
1. "Amateurs focus on tactics while the pros follow processes."
If you ask someone how they would achieve a certain goal, and they start listing off a bunch of tactics, that's not a good sign.
Processes allow for structured direction in pursuit of your goals as well as the prioritization needed to work on the right stuff in relation to limitless options.
2. Velocity over perfection.
Perfectionism is the pleasant-sounding word to mask what is essentially fear. Excellence, as well as learning, are forged through action, data collection, and iteration.
3. Minimum Viable Tests.
Instead of mapping out a grandiose, expensive undertaking, first ask “What’s the cheapest and fastest way I can gather enough data to make an informed decision?”
4. Don't discount small wins.
Incremental results add up, in experimentation, life, and SEO.
Especially when done consistently, chipping away and racking up many small wins can make a big difference in the long run (especially when investing in compounding channels)
5. Do things others can't or won't.
Our editorial standards at CXL were "every article has to be the best piece in the world on the subject."
This was hard, expensive, time consuming, and a totally impossible standard. But it allowed us to stand out.
6. Buy a dollar for $0.50.
Find opportunities to reduce the cost of experimentation or of repeatable actions. This inherently increases the expected value of everything you do.”
Event of the Week: Scaling an Experimentation Program at an Australian cosmetics e-retailer
On 9th March, join Shiva Manjunath, Lucia van den Brink, and Luke Hardwick, as they share the tools and processes they used to scale an Australian online cosmetics retailer experimentation program. Learn and get:
🔷 — The maturity score of your own program
🔷 — How to set up and use a knowledge base for a growing program
🔷 — How can the program management tools and systems support high-velocity A/B testing and knowledge/ideation maintenance
Walk away with tools and processes you can implement right away. Explore how an Australian online cosmetics retailer scaled its program, kept winning, and increased testing velocity.
9th March 2023.
3 pm Sydney time.
No registration fee.
If you can't make it to the live workshop, register and we will send you the recording afterward.
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