UX experiments / Persuasion
Persuasion · A/B test · first-person account
Recommendations in the shopping cart: help or distraction?
Show recommendations inside the shopping cart? A senior VP said it would distract people from checking out.
Make your call. Which version won, and why? Decide before you open the result. Guessing first is what trains your judgment.
Made your call? See the result
Recommendations won by a wide margin and launched.
What happened
Engineer Greg Linden was told to stop. He ran the test anyway. Not having the feature was costing Amazon noticeable money.
Why it worked
Relevant items at the moment of buying grew the basket more than the distraction cost.
The takeaway
Data beats the HiPPO, the highest paid person's opinion. Bring evidence, not seniority.
Source
- Ron Kohavi · experimentation tutorial (cites Linden) (ai.stanford.edu)
More experiments to call
Practice the call
Call experiments like these every day.
Irreplaceable gives you a few real experiments a day to call before you see the result, and tracks how your judgment improves. Start with a free baseline: 12 decisions, about 12 minutes.