The main goal of split testing is to compare the performance of multiple components or parameters. Naturally, we cannot do so without measuring this performance. Our performance metric may be a click through rate, such as in our related content widget example, or other conversion metrics, such visits to an retail website resulting in a purchase. [...]
My last post outlined some initial thoughts about requirements for easy split testing of web sites. In this post I assert that modular design is a critical component of any web system you wish to improve through testing. Software developers are well educated about the value of modular design for reuse and testing of correctness. [...]
It’s not hard to see the importance of performing tests on web systems. We regularly hear how companies such as Amazon, Google, or Facebook employ A/B testing, also known as split testing and multivariate testing, to quickly test variations of their websites. Deploying a test to a percentage of a site’s requests can quickly measure [...]
My friend Daniel Tunkelang recently made the arguments that Twitter isn’t a search engine, nor is their search engine hard to build. While I certainly agree that Twitter is not a search engine, I disagree with several of his comments with regards to their search engine. As an advocate of HCIR, I’m surprised Daniel didn’t [...]
My girlfriend Christine Mahady (Chris) and I recently met with my friend Alexander Flurie to discuss a potential project. The project revolves around making a tool to assist in performing close readings in an educational environment. Close reading is a technique used in literary criticism which focuses on the careful analysis of the language of [...]
Twitter has linked to Summize’s conversation search to show real-time coverage of tweets for WWDC. It’s great to see Twitter promoting Summize, but I felt overwhelmed by the volume of the search results. I’d really like to see Summize provide some summarization, filtering, or categorization to their results to help me deal with the volume of tweets on popular subjects.