ChampionChallenge

When re-designing your site there often is the temptation to argue about which is "the best" approach, or which new feature would work best with your particular customers. Rather than letting it turn into an ego war why not try both approaches, serving one "design" to half your customers and the other to the other half and see which design sold most. We also call this Test-Driven Design

Test-Driven Design

This is a simple approach to designing web sites. Imagine you have an online store and you have some ideas for improvements. You could apply the changes and see if you sold more items OR you could automatically serve the old site to half your users, and the version with the changes to the other half and see which of those was most successful.

Whilst you wouldn't want to test EVERY change and the data you get always has some level of questionability, using a Champion Challenge approach often is more convincing than mere gut feeling and quicker than organising a whole raft of usability tests.\


See: Using a Test-driven Design Approach∞