A/B testing development - A developer overview (Part - 2)

Faroque Abdullah — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 10:12:02 +0000

In my previous blog Part 1, I have explained what is A/B testing and why we need A/B testing. Now I will discuss about different ways of A/B testing. Mainly there are two ways of A/B testing Client side and Server side.

Client Side A/B testing:

Relatively quick and easy to deploy. It actually works only on the browser where you will inject javascript code to the browser to modify your UI/UX. The client-side approach is by far the most common solution employed in the market today. In this approach, all tests and experiences are rendered from the client-side browser, using Javascript. There are few.

Advantages of client-side A/B testing:

Easy to deploy.
Easy to work around.
No backend limitations.
Even non-technical people can work by the help of visual editor.
Only need basic javascript, HTML and CSS to develop a complex test.
No risk to conflict with your production code.

Disadvantage of client-side A/B testing:

Only targeted on browser.
Some times control flicker can arise.
Limited to the page functionality not to the app functionality.
Not able to work on business logic.
Sometimes page takes time to load.
Few browser can block third party A/B testing tools to inject script.

Server-side A/B testing:

Server-side A/B testing is a form of experimentation where the variations of a test are rendered directly on the web server, before it is delivered to the client. So you need to deploy you variations code to the server.

Advantages of server-side A/B testing:

Write the same programming language which is using in the server.
Get more customising option in you app functionality.
No control flicker as code is coming from the server itself.
Work on any business logic inside your application.

Disadvantage of server-side A/B testing:

Time consuming and harder development process compare to client-side.
Every time needed production deployment to host the test.
Built into your web application tech stack.

There are many tools in the market to work on A/B testing. We will discuss about some A/B testing tools and their architecture in our future blog . Happy Coding !!!!!

A/B testing development - A developer overview (Part - 1)

Faroque Abdullah — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 22:09:42 +0000

I am not a marketing guy or CRO expert, I am a developer. As a developer, Selling a product is not my concern but after working with CRO agencies for a long time, I have learned that how customer behaviour is changing based on the change of UI and UX, which leads them to buy your products. In traditional software development, We mostly depends on the final design of our product but it doesn't work most of the cases.

To get feedback of our system, We need to check with our customer if our existing system is increasing the CRO rate or not. CRO(Conversion rate optimisation) is very important for an online business because it can bring you more customer engagement and more sell.

So, How can we check with customer by changing two or more number of UI/UX variations and know which one is bringing more CROs? We can update your production logic to show various variations(or Experiments) to random customer and see which one is working. But this is very time consuming for developers and bad for production code to maintain so many redundant code in production which will not be use in near future. To solve this problems we have A/B testing tools to rescue.

What is A/B testing? According to wikipedia 'A/B testing (also known as bucket testing, split-run testing, or split testing) is a user experience research methodology. A/B tests consist of a randomised experiment that usually involves two variants (A and B), although the concept can be also extended to multiple variants of the same variable. It includes application of statistical hypothesis testing or "two-sample hypothesis testing" as used in the field of statistics. A/B testing is a way to compare multiple versions of a single variable, for example by testing a subject's response to variant A against variant B, and determining which of the variants is more effective.

In simple word, You are running an experiment by your customer to see, Which user experience is more effective for your business. I remember, I have worked with a top cinema booking site of Europe. Where we have just increased 67% sell by changing the CTA(Booking Button) colour from blue to green and It was just unbelievable to me. We had launched 4 variations of CTA. I also remembered we had increased 40% customer engagement on a search bar of a travel agency by just updating the search functionality. Which had the direct relation with their sell.

There are many ways of A/B testing development Front End, Back End, API, CDN etc. In our next blog Part 2, We will discuss about different ways of A/B testing, how A/B testing tools works and architecture of A/B testing tool. Until then Happy Coding!!

DEV Community: Faroque Abdullah

A/B testing development - A developer overview (Part - 2)

Client Side A/B testing:

Server-side A/B testing:

A/B testing development - A developer overview (Part - 1)