Testing helps optimize your user experience from start to finish — from landing pages and home pages to product information to checkout processes to form fills and beyond. A/B testing can help optimize these areas and more.
It’s also your first step toward truly personalizing your customer experiences, by uncovering how audiences respond differently to varied experiences. So, how do you get your testing program underway?
Effective A/B testing, from a process prospective requires three key factors that you need to address upfront:
1. Build the right team
Make sure that you have the people with the right skill set at your table and strong, empowered execution leader to make decisions when needed. Stakeholders will be key as well; you’ll need their buy-in to keep your program going. Other key team members include a strategist, project manager, developer, QA resource, and analyst. Although these team members don’t have to be 100 percent dedicated resources, best-in-class testing programs have a best-in-class team that is 100 percent allocated to the testing program.
2. Strong processes
Having team members understand their individual position in the workflow and knowing who to pass the baton to will speed up areas that typically create slow-downs, like governance and approvals. A strong testing process lays the foundation for a high-velocity, high-learning-rate program.
3. Solid foundational test bed
When you start to really dig into your data, you will have TONS of test ideas. And that list will continue to grow as you learn more. It is critical to have a repository for these ideas and a way to prioritize them so that you focus your testing efforts where they will matter most with a roadmap to keep your program running. Keeping a well-documented roadmap and results repository will sustain senior leadership engagement and support in the process, as well as enable them to allocate the necessary resources to ensure program success.
This blog post is an excerpt from Merkle’s latest guide, A/B Testing Isn’t Dead. To get more best practices for optimizing UX, and learn to jump start your UX testing, visit the download page.
