Optimizely's New Announcement and Why You Should Care

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A/B testing is a simple idea which, when done well yields great insights for shaping website and app development. With a well-done A/B test you can optimize site performance, and better craft user experience. A/B testing is not a new concept for most development teams. But few software engineers will spend the time and or money to implement a robust A/B testing solution for their products. Enter  Optimizely. Optimizely gives developers quick, simple to use tools to start A/B testing on real apps and websites. You can think of them as A/B Testing As A Service, with a simple, easy to use set of tools that developers will applaud. Even the “normals” can understand it. How does it work? Lets say you have an iPhone app and you’re thinking about improving the look and feel for an upcoming version. You could make the change, send your update to Apple, wait 1-2 weeks for approval, then voila! your new design is live in the App Store. But suppose you start getting an overwhelming amount of 1-Star ratings from customers. They’re complaining that the new user interface is clunky, or confusing, or just plain ugly. Your only recourse would be to make another update, or rollback your changes. Then you’d have to re-submit, wait the 1-2 weeks and your update goes live. See what just happened? You wanted to try something out, and it cost you a month of time and a heap of bad App Store reviews. Optimizely shrinks this timeframe down to as short as you want it to be. It allows you to perform “experiments” on your app, live, without having to re-submit an App Store update. The changes can be applied to all users to change something globally, or to small segments of users to try something out on a small sample group. Sounds pretty powerful, but what’s the catch? Up until now, the service hasn’t been cheap. It’s cost a minimum of $19 a month, with the cost scaling up for additional usage and features. But today,  Optimizely announced a broadening of the company focus from “simple, powerful A/B Testing” to a loftier, more holistic goal of “Experience Optimization”. Along with the announcement comes an attractive new pricing model, as well as the announcement of a forthcoming Android SDK. With cross-platform support, and a generous free tier (not a trial plan), there’s really no excuse to put off A/B testing your app(s) and website(s) any longer. Keep an eye on the blog and next week we’ll post a tutorial on how to:
  • Create an Optimizely account
  • Install the Optimizely SDK into a new iPhone app
  • Create and run an A/B test in the Optimizely dashboard