Which half? One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death!" God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?" E.E. Peacock Jr., Seeing With Fresh Eyes science
Monkeys testing random designs A Tweet by Jared Spool twitter.com A/B testing is an effective approach to use science to design and deliver deeply-frustrating user experiences. A/B testing without upfront research is just random monkeys testing random designs to see which of those designs do “best” against random criteria. If drug testing was actually implemented like most A/B tests, you’d give 2 drugs to 2 groups of people and pick the “winner” by whichever group had fewer deaths. uxresearch