Our old homepage hero technically showed all the platforms we support - but it felt overly corporate, like a feature list wearing a trench coat. The previous hero featured an animated headline that rotated through Buffer's supported social media platforms. While it did the job, it didn't feel very "Buffer-y." We wanted to make a stronger first impression - something with more liveliness and delight.
While experimentation is essential, traditional A/B testing can be excessively slow and expensive, according to DoorDash engineers Caixia Huang and Alex Weinstein. To address these limitations, they adopted a "multi-armed bandits" (MAB) approach to optimize their experiments. When running experiments, organizations aim to minimize the opportunity cost, or regret, caused by serving the less effective variants to a subset of the user base.
Here's what actually happened: A Microsoft employee working on Bing proposed a seemingly minor change to how the search engine displayed ad headlines. The idea required minimal effort-just a few days of engineering time-but it was buried among hundreds of other proposals. Program managers deemed it insignificant and let it languish. The breakthrough came when an engineer, recognizing the low development cost, decided to test the idea anyway.
A/B testing is the gold standard of experimentation. It is meant to help companies make faster, better, data-driven decisions. But too often, it does the opposite. The meeting starts with optimism: a new pricing idea, ad layout, or signup screen goes into an A/B test. After waiting for weeks, analysts come back with p-values, 95% confidence thresholds, and a familiar conclusion: "We should wait for more data. We don't have enough evidence yet, and it's not statistically significant."
Last year, a study found that cars are steadily getting less colourful. In the US, around 80% of cars are now black, white, gray, or silver, up from 60% in 2004. This trend has been attributed to cost savings and consumer preferences. Whatever the reasons, the result is hard to deny: a big part of daily life isn't as colourful as it used to be.
SMB marketers in the B2B sector say conversion rate optimization (CRO) is their top A/B testing priority in 2025, but a new report found most aren't running A/B tests to improve CRO. The " State of A/B Testing Report " from Unbounce found 56% of SMB marketers in B2B cite CRO as their top testing goal. However, only 32% are running A/B tests on their landing pages.
