On November 18th, 2014, we publicly released Optimizely’s iOS editor. Before we launched, there was one problem the whole team rallied behind to fix: we weren’t proud of the product. To fix this issue, we went beyond a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to an MVPP—the Minimum Viable Product we’re Proud of.
This is the story of how we pulled this off, what we learned along the way, and product development tips to help you ship great products, from the perspective of someone who just did it.
Earlier this year, we released a major addition to Optimizely’s preview tool: the ability to impersonate visitors.
In this post, I will describe our design process and the decisions we made along the way when building this feature to shed some light on how product features are ideated, developed, and released at Optimizely.
We just switched our typeface and webfont solution on optimizely.com, so I took this opportunity to compare the performance impact of our old service and our new service.
When running an A/B test, you typically want to see a clear winner. But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes results are insignificant. And if you have a well-defined test hypothesis behind why you’re running the test in the first place, then an insignificant result can be just as useful as a clear winner. On optimizely.com, […]
Anyone who has ever ignored to-do lists knows that any friction between yourself and your goal leads to frustration and potentially giving up altogether. Similar to the way we experience this feeling in real life is how we feel about to-do’s online. So we sign up online for something that requires an extra step, how […]
Looking for a way to get users to engage with your product or service? Just tell them everyone else is doing it. Although we like to think of ourselves as independent beings who make our own decisions, studies show that touting popularity and ubiquity is a very effective form of persuasion. This is known as […]
Testing Theory: Academic Studies You’ll Actually Use is a series that provides practical testing ideas based on the study of how people make decisions (formally known as behavioral economics). Photos have the power to greatly influence conversions and engagement, but testing them is tricky. There are so many potential images you could be using, how […]
When thinking about A/B testing, the pivotal question is what to test. Ideally you should focus your testing efforts on the page elements that are most likely to have an impact. A great source of discovery for high impact elements can come from focusing on the user experience. Usability studies, user experience research, heuristic evaluations, […]
Testing Theory: Academic Studies You’ll Actually Use is a series that provides practical testing ideas based on the study of how people make decisions (formally known as behavioral economics). A common piece of advice in the AB testing space is to test headlines and images to find the combination that yields maximum value. But there […]
