DEV Community

Faroque Abdullah
Faroque Abdullah

Posted on • Updated on

A/B testing development - A developer overview (Part - 1)

I am not a marketing guy or CRO expert, I am a developer. As a developer, Selling a product is not my concern but after working with CRO agencies for a long time, I have learned that how customer behaviour is changing based on the change of UI and UX, which leads them to buy your products. In traditional software development, We mostly depends on the final design of our product but it doesn't work most of the cases.

To get feedback of our system, We need to check with our customer if our existing system is increasing the CRO rate or not. CRO(Conversion rate optimisation) is very important for an online business because it can bring you more customer engagement and more sell.

So, How can we check with customer by changing two or more number of UI/UX variations and know which one is bringing more CROs? We can update your production logic to show various variations(or Experiments) to random customer and see which one is working. But this is very time consuming for developers and bad for production code to maintain so many redundant code in production which will not be use in near future. To solve this problems we have A/B testing tools to rescue.

What is A/B testing? According to wikipedia 'A/B testing (also known as bucket testing, split-run testing, or split testing) is a user experience research methodology. A/B tests consist of a randomised experiment that usually involves two variants (A and B), although the concept can be also extended to multiple variants of the same variable. It includes application of statistical hypothesis testing or "two-sample hypothesis testing" as used in the field of statistics. A/B testing is a way to compare multiple versions of a single variable, for example by testing a subject's response to variant A against variant B, and determining which of the variants is more effective.

A/B Testing

In simple word, You are running an experiment by your customer to see, Which user experience is more effective for your business. I remember, I have worked with a top cinema booking site of Europe. Where we have just increased 67% sell by changing the CTA(Booking Button) colour from blue to green and It was just unbelievable to me. We had launched 4 variations of CTA. I also remembered we had increased 40% customer engagement on a search bar of a travel agency by just updating the search functionality. Which had the direct relation with their sell.

There are many ways of A/B testing development Front End, Back End, API, CDN etc. In our next blog Part 2, We will discuss about different ways of A/B testing, how A/B testing tools works and architecture of A/B testing tool. Until then Happy Coding!!

Top comments (0)