A/B Testing Experiment

Dream Bigger

Instructions

Carefully read the instruction sheet (PDF, 106 KB) and then form teams as described below. After next section of this blog post, you can see what the website currently looks like and preview different variables you will be testing today.

 

Teams

Team #1

  1. Linding Jørgensen, Elin
  2. MacFarland, Ian
  3. Phan, Evie
  4. Swigert, Peter
  5. Tsai, Dan

 

Team #2

  1. Agrawal, Siddharth
  2. Greis, David
  3. Hitchcock, Meredith
  4. Li, Johnny
  5. Jakobsen, Ronnie

 

Team #3

  1. Berger, Michael
  2. Fan, Christopher
  3. Pérez, Ignacio
  4. Puthyapurayil, Seema
  5. Young, Paul

 

Team #4

  1. Chen, Jung-Wei Jennifer
  2. Friedman, Sydney
  3. Gutman, Max
  4. Malhotra, Ramit
  5. Siddiqui, Sufia

 

Team #5

  1. Arvizu, Pablo
  2. Hess, Jonas
  3. Lo, Jenny
  4. Sparks, Evan

 

Current Look of the Website

Current look of shopPBS.org
Current look of shopPBS.org

Variables

Header Color

Blue header (current)
1. Blue header (current)
Black header
2. Black header
Green header
3. Green header
Red header
4. Red header

Header Categories

  1. Recently Broadcast
  2. Topics
  3. Shows
  4. Drama & Arts
  5. History
  6. Science
  7. Gifts
  8. Sale

Promo Banner

Option #1
Option #1
Option #2
Option #2
Option #3
Option #3 (current)

Products Displayed

4
8
16
24 (current)
48

Strengths and weaknesses of A/B Testing

Learn Ferociously, , ,

In one of my other courses we are experimenting with A/B testing on our own designs. The syllabus introduced this Wired article in which the strengths and weaknesses of the method are discussed. Just as the assigned chapters for this course the article builds on the Optimizely founder, Dan Siroker’s revelation during the Obama 2008 campaign, but it also takes a critical perspective and highlights some of the potential downsides of A/B testing. I especially think the method’s bias towards incremental improvement and its lack of lessons are worth bringing into our discussion on Friday.

Positive pressure

Move People

We talked a lot about peer pressure as a lever that managers can use to control their employees, but it’s also important to think about how peer pressure can be used in a more empowering context, where people voluntarily submit to peer evaluation to help themselves accomplish a desired goal when many demands are competing for their time.

I can give an example from personal experience. It wasn’t done within a work context, but the basic mechanism applies.

I worked as a newspaper journalist in New York for several years before coming to the I School, and the old cliche about every reporter having an unfinished novel stashed in his or her desk drawer is more or less true. It’s an information-intensive (and especially a writing-intensive) job and it’s hard to find the time and headspace for a personal project on the side. So over the years, a group of us all knew we had this mutual interest and eventually we decided to act on it by staring a writing group where we would all get together and share some personal writing once a month.

Getting feedback was definitely a benefit of this group, but the real value — one we explicitly talked about and sought out — was that the combination of peer encouragement and peer pressure (the fear of disappointing our respected peers by failing to produce) gave us the extra motivation to make room in our lives for something that we cared about but that could be difficult to prioritize when it conferred little tangible benefit (unlike working, cleaning your apartment, running errands, etc.).

If we can generalize a little bit from this case example, I think this can be an effective structure for keeping longer-term projects on track when you have good buy-in from your team but a lot of competing demands on your time.

Somm

Learn Ferociously, , ,
Screenshot from the documentary Somm

I recently watched the documentary Somm, available on Netflix. It’s about four men who are trying to achieve the rank of Master Sommelier, the highest possible rank for a sommelier in the world. The diploma’s been available since 1969, but only 214 people had earned it by the end of last year. The test has three parts: theory, service, and a blind, 25-minute taste test of 5 wines. In the taste test, they have to be able to identify the grape varietal, the region from which the wine came, and the year. 

Their journey to the exam reminded me a lot of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and the focus Jiro exhibited. The exam occurs only once a year, and obviously only a handful of people pass. The sommeliers in the film spend all of their time focusing on this one task: pass the test. At the end, they mention that it’s only the beginning, they have to constantly learn more and refine their palates to stay on top. It’s a great look at what it takes to be the best in this particular field, and to do what many would consider (nearly) impossible.

Quitting Smoking, and the Ulysses Contract

Move People, ,

This episode of Radiolab begins with a former civil rights activist, Zelda, who wants to quit smoking after 40+ years. She makes a deal with herself: the day she smokes another cigarette, she has to donate $5,000 to the KKK. She picks a friend to hold her to it. The episode frames this (somewhat extreme) example in the larger context: it’s a “Ulysses Contract.” In it, you make a decision that will design it so that it binds you in the future. Ulysses wants to hear the sirens, but men who hear them inevitably go mad and navigate their boat onto the rocks. He has his men stuff their ears with wax so they can’t hear, and then have them tie him to the mast. They’re not to change course no matter what he says and no matter how much he protests.

The key point here for Zelda is that she has a larger goal of quitting smoking. But when faced with cigarettes, the immediate desire overwhelmed her longer term goal. To make it stick and break the habit, she had to come up with something that was terrible and immediate enough to overwhelm her desire for the cigarette. An added point is that by telling her friend, there’s accountability for keeping her promise to stop smoking.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/117165-help/

 

Serious Behavior Change: End of Life Discussions

Move People

One of the most difficult situations to have is discussing end of life conversations. End of life discussions concern making an “advanced directive” outlining how people want to die.

Some 96 percent of people who die in La Crosse, Wisconsin, have an advance directive or similar documentation. Nationally, only about 30 percent of adults have a document like that.

La Crosse’s success at implementing such a difficult widespread behavior change is a great example of the principles of altering the situation with nudges. The La Crosse medical community proactively incorporates end-of-life discussions in every comprehensively across many patient interactions with hospital nurses in a multitude of situations. Essentially, members of La Crosse as patients are unable to escape the medical hospital being an open resource to be “trusted advisors” to start end of life discussions. By sprinkling “nudges” across numerous interactions with medical staff, La Crosse maximizes the chances that patients will say start the discussion instead of postponing it indefinitely.

Since 25% of medical costs is spent in the last year of life, La Crosse’s efforts have led it spend less on health care for patients at the end of life than any other place in the country, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas.

Article Synopsis: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/03/05/286126451/living-wills-are-the-talk-of-the-town-in-la-crosse-wis

Full Podcast:http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/28/283444163/episode-521-the-town-that-loves-death

Peer Pressure: Changing Electricity Consumption Habits

Move People

Opower is a company that uses old fashion subtle peer pressure techniques to get people to use less energy. It just recently went IPO this week  and its success follows failed attempts by both Google and Microsoft to generate similar consumer outcomes.

Basically Opower has implemented many of Robert Cialdini behavior changing techniques. The key magic is a paper statement to each household 1) comparing the house’s energy consumption with the community’s average and 2) giving a simple grade assessing your energy consumption made of smiley faces.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_efficient_planet/2013/03/opower_using_smiley_faces_and_peer_pressure_to_save_the_planet.html

Pi-Shaped people

Discipline Collaboration

“Before the data revolution, scientists could be thought of as a “T-shaped”—broadly skilled with depth in their fields of expertise. But in this data-rich era of discovery, Lazowska says scientists will need to be “Pi shaped” (π): still broadly skilled, but now with deep expertise in data science in addition to their scientific domain.”

from Big Data Grant from Moore, Sloan Aims to Make Pi-Shaped Scientists 

The article states that after the data revolution we are not only in need of T-shaped people but Pi-shaped instead. Do you agree?

Ubuntu cutting service to focus on OS development

Do Less, Not More

Ubuntu, one of the most widely used Linux distributions, just announced that it is halting its cloud storage service so it can focus on its desktop and mobile operating systems:

Shutting down Ubuntu One file services

This sounds like a good example of a company trying to focus on a core product rather than be bogged down trying to compete in another arena. A few key quotes:

Today we are announcing plans to shut down the Ubuntu One file services.  This is a tough decision, particularly when our users rely so heavily on the functionality that Ubuntu One provides.  However, like any company, we want to focus our efforts on our most important strategic initiatives and ensure we are not spread too thin.

…

Additionally, the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for us to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB-50GB free storage.  If we offer a service, we want it to compete on a global scale, and for Ubuntu One to continue to do that would require more investment than we are willing to make.

 

 

 

One Simple Goal

Dream Bigger

For many prodigies, focus comes naturally. For the rest of us, it takes a large amount of work.  For this 15 year old chef, his focus is set on the highest attainable and yet the most difficult goal possible in his field: have the best restaurant in the world by the time he’s 19. While easier said than done, the article lays out a plan for how he might do so.  A sense of urgency stood out the most to me as the advice from other chefs emphasized patience.  On the other hand, they did not have the best restaurant at 19 years old.

Article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/magazine/the-chef-at-15.html?rref=magazine&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Magazine&pgtype=article