[Column] Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten: Ceci n'est pas une A/B test

Change is hard. You can’t try it and see if it works. You have to ram it down people’s throats.

It's not uncommon to say: lets see how it works out, when you are trying something new. I’ve also learned the best way to make sure nothing works out is to simply see how it works out. If you want to make a change you have to fight for it. People will resist change. People will hate you for even trying to make a change.

Although there are a lot of benefits to A/B testing, there’s also a risk of thinking it can make all the decisions for you. A bold new design might take some time to be accepted. Most people are hoping for a faster horse, not a stinking, expensive, hard-to-maintain new machine.

The advantages of the new thing might only be clear in the beginning to you, not your audience. Most people dislike change and will not be pleased at first. A/B testing then becomes a sort of design by committee and that’s just not the purpose it is meant to solve. No amount of A/B testing would have ever given us the Mona Lisa, an iMac without a floppy drive, or a man on the moon.

Sometimes you have to make the right decision that everybody hates.

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Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten is een serial internet entrepreneur en is oprichter en eigenaar van The Next Web, een techmediabedrijf dat zich focust op Generation T; de generatie met een groeiende interesse in technologie. Voor The Next Web schrijft Boris wekelijks een blog die tevens wordt gepubliceerd op Marketing Report.

@Boris

Lees ook:

21-09-2018: [Column] Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten: Impatient patience
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23-07-2018: [Column] Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten: Stop talking about failure