What We Do

  • Consulting
  • Full-Service Experimentation
  • Staff Augmentation
  • Training
Consulting

Brooks Bell offers consulting services to help organizations increase the impact and efficiency of their testing programs while developing industry leaders from within.

Program Advisement

Our expert consultants partner with testing program leaders to identify areas of focus including the development of communication frameworks, strategy vetting, team skill refinement, KPI identification, and documentation standardization.

Digital Experimentation Performance Assessment

The Brooks Bell Digital Experimentation Performance Assessment is a third party evaluation of your current experimentation program.  It focuses on the six key pillars of a successful and high-performing testing program.  The Assessment evaluates strengths and weaknesses across each pillar (culture, team, strategy, tech and tools, performance, and process), provides recommendations on how to improve and grow your program, and benchmarks performance against other experimentation programs across a wide-range of industries and verticals.

Data is gathered through practitioner and management surveys and in-person interviews to gain a 360 degree view of your experimentation program.

Process Standardization

We work with you to establish a standardized process for test execution by investigating your testing ecosystem and capabilities, current execution process, experiment design, ideation methodology, and data analytics to create a customized process that can be applied across all your product and business teams. Our goal is to first identify areas for improvement and  then design a new process that is easy to implement, increases efficiency, and is more effective for all testing groups.

Cluster Analysis

Cluster analysis enables businesses to develop the understanding of their customers necessary to provide relevant experiences, ultimately moving closer to personalization. A cluster analysis utilizes unsupervised learning techniques to generate unique, and often surprising digital affinity groups. These “clusters” can then be targeted with experiences contextualized to meet the specific needs of each group, with results verified through testing.

Tool Assessments

A tool assessment is an in-depth review of your organization’s current testing or analytics tool, considering usage, capabilities, program goals, and practitioner needs to provide a recommendation on a “best fit” or alternate acceptable tools.

 

Testing Tool Assessment

Data is gathered through interviews to create detailed requirements documentation focused on program needs including usability, administration, and integration, along with essential criteria such as permissions. Evaluation of alternate testing tools is based on a prioritized weighting of your needs and requirements. Our team also works to create a customized rollout plan for tool usage.

 

Analytics Tool Assessment

Data is gathered via interviews to compile detailed requirements documentation focused on variables important to your organization including insights and tracking capabilities, integration with other tools (especially testing tools and backend systems), implementation time, ease of use, and visualization of data.

Full-Service Experimentation

Let us be your dream team to help scale your program and get quick testing wins. A dedicated Brooks Bell team including an account manager, project manager, developer, optimization analyst, UX designer, QA specialist, and content strategist will execute your testing roadmap.

Data-driven Test Strategy

Brooks Bell’s methodology has been refined over 14 years to incorporate the perfect blend of quantitative data, qualitative data, and behavioral economics principles. This data is stored in Illuminate, our proprietary testing and strategy database. The database houses and surfaces insights which allow us to see strategic performance indices across verticals and page types. It also features an algorithm capable of suggesting specific, proven tactics to solve user problems. Our optimization experts use these valuable resources to evaluate potential solutions and create a successful strategy.

Test Queue Management and Prioritization

Coming up with great ideas for experiments is difficult and requires a lot of thinking. Once you have started to accumulate ideas, how do you organize and prioritize what launches next?

Brooks Bell creates customized prioritization queues that draw on our years of testing experience and consider KPI impact, segments, duration, level of effort, business goal objectives, and more.

Creative Concepts for Test Variations

Our creative process starts with a consideration of usability issues discovered by analyzing your site’s data and our many methods of usability research that can be conducted with your target customers. By identifying potential problems, we are able to come up with valuable and targeted creative solutions. We then work within your brand guidelines and website architecture to design solutions that look and feel like your brand while improving usability and increasing conversions.

Pre- and Post-launch QA

We want everything we put out into the world to be as perfect as possible. Our rigorous quality assurance process ensures each test looks, reads, and performs exactly as you expect.

Development of Test Experiences

For many optimization programs, finding development resources to execute tests can be a real challenge. We ensure you always have a team ready to help convert your ideas into testable experiences.

Has the test experience been coded to prevent page flicker? Does the code work across devices? Are the proper metrics coded to ensure you are capturing necessary data points? Whether your site is non-responsive, responsive, or a single-page application, our experts can draw on over 20 years of experience in optimization to help you leverage your tools and platforms to overcome technical hurdles and get your tests live.

Testing and Analytics Tool Setup

Technology is only as good as the people that implement and refine it. Testing and analytics tools can help automate some tasks out of the box, but many of the features that drive business value need to be vetted by experienced testing professionals.

Is the data you are tracking really what you think you are tracking? Should you swim-lane traffic? Is your testing tool accurately passing data to the analytics tool? Have you identified and defined the most valuable segments? Is it in your best interest to circumvent the analytics tool altogether and make API requests? We ensure that your technology is in place to serve you, and not the other way around.

Project and Schedule Management

Incredible service and skillful communication infuses our project management process every step of the way. This results in a project plan that fits your needs. We lead projects by customizing the pace, process, and plan to match your company’s unique culture, goals, and requirements. The result is a predictable process that feels easy from start to finish.

Detailed Analysis, Learnings, and Insights

We facilitate full utilization of our clients’ data-rich environments by leveraging the power of advanced analytics to elevate test analysis, uncover insights from test results, and provide estimates of the annual incremental revenue gained from winning tests. To maximize positive business outcomes, we use experimental standards to increase the probability that our tests detect a significant difference and lower the false positive errors associated with arbitrary stopping bias. We also implement non-parametric simulation techniques and correct for the multiple comparison problem to provide reliable confidence levels and associated intervals. Good analysts use testing to help your organization become data storytellers, great analysts do so without playing make believe.

Staff Augmentation

To overcome resource bottlenecks and maximize your organization’s testing output and capacity, we can lend you one or more full-time pros in design, development, and analytics.

Testing Strategy

Experimentation strategy is our passion, and has been for over 14 years. We’ve run countless optimization programs for enterprise level companies, so we know the complexity you’re facing.

We’ve optimized our own strategic methodology to incorporate the perfect blend of quantitative data, qualitative data, and behavioral economics. Working with Brooks Bell allows you to inject our years of expertise directly into your team. We can even teach you how to build this skillset within your internal team, providing a plan for growth that is free of outside dependencies.

We offer services including custom experimentation strategy training, collaborative experimentation backlog evaluation, documentation templates to help gather better informed experiment ideas from across your organization — anything you need to create a strategically guided and tactically successful program. If you are seeking experimentation strategy assistance, we’ve got you covered.

Project Management

Our project managers work with you to set goals and milestones, managing resources against the timelines and budgets of your program — from individual experiments to campaign completion. They work with you to facilitate and contribute to testing strategy sessions and QA functionality, working with your in-house experimentation team as well as stakeholders outside the team.

UX/Creative

Our UX team members bring your experiment concepts to life. This process includes creating wireframes for concepts, producing assets that are used in the experiment and ensuring the look and feel of designs adhere to your brand’s guidelines. Our UX designers have the unique ability to communicate the story of your concepts to stakeholders and developers.

Analytics

Brooks Bell analysts have unique expertise in optimization. They are the go-to team member to perform pre-test ideation research, set the experiment design, initialize and launch the campaign, perform pre-launch and post-launch data validation, monitor and end the experiment, analyze results, extract insights, and deliver recommendations.

Each Brooks Bell analyst is an expert in ‘R’, which enables the team to utilize the latest data science techniques as well as allowing for more automation, speed, and error reduction.  This empowers each analyst to spend more time doing what they love to do — analyzing data and finding actionable insights.

Development

Our team of experienced front-end developers creates custom code that maximizes the power of your testing tool. They work to ensure technical requirements are met prior to test setup and have experience solving problems like page flicker, module integration, and code conflicts.

QA

The last thing anyone wants is a broken experience for users. Our Quality Assurance professionals ensure that your experiment runs as expected. They check the specification guidelines for look and feel consistency in addition to functionality errors across all common browsers, operating systems, and devices. Over the years, Brooks Bell has continued to build one of the most comprehensive QA checklist guides that the team adheres to so that our clients feel confident our tests run without issues.

Training

From executive to practitioner, we offer training programs to develop your team’s skills across all core testing competencies including strategic planning, technical training, tool usage, and analytics.

Strategy Ideation and Process Training

Our Strategy and Process training is designed for organizations that want to improve the quality, maturity, and impact of their testing strategies. Brooks Bell’s Strategy Ideation Methodology helps teams generate testing ideas internally that are data-driven (using qualitative and quantitative data) and collaborative. The Methodology allows teams to efficiently evaluate strategies and build effective testing roadmaps.

 

The Brooks Bell 3 step methodology includes:
  1. Data Research and Gathering –  includes both qualitative and quantitative data to inform strategy ideation
  2. Strategy Ideation – uses proven tactics and behavioral science to craft strategies that will improve users’ online experience
  3. Queue Prioritization – identifies which tests should be on-deck based on resources, effort, impact, and feasibility
Bootcamps

 

Web Analyst to Testing Analyst Bootcamp

In this one-day bootcamp, Brooks Bell trainers will onboard or transform your web analyst into testing analyst. The curriculum focuses on testing tool integrations, understanding testing and optimization metrics, standardizing segments and reporting, and working with the API in R and Excel to deliver repeatable test reporting and analysis.

 

Center of Excellence (COE) Lead Bootcamp

This two-day training is designed to help a COE lead (or leads) guide and manage self-service organizations. The training sessions focus on program measurement, community building, service structure, strategy leadership, and program management. Brooks Bell consultants will interview members of your team to determine the appropriate, customized training program necessary to achieve success.

Experiment Design Training

Geared towards project managers and analysts, this training module focuses on the connections between hypothesis generation and test setup. There is a specific focus on using methods to ensure the experiment includes the appropriate audience and KPIs to prove the hypothesis. Additional statistical topics include sample sizing, bias, and calculating duration.

Testing Results and Insights Storytelling Training

While most analysts are experts at number crunching and chart making, an optimization analyst must be an expert in telling a story and choosing the right graph or data point to validate that story. This training, designed for analysts, focuses on ensuring that reports are not merely data-dumps, but instead, provide insights that can drive an iterative testing culture.

Developer and Tool Training
Advanced Tagging

This training module was created for both developers and analysts. It focuses on the evaluation of current event and visitor tagging and the coding of custom metrics that fire with the testing tool and/or analytics platform.

 

Front End Coding within Optimizely

This module is designed for developers. Trainers work hand-in-hand with the developer through the process of using the code editor to develop tests. Depending on the need, one of the outputs may include reusable code snippets.

 

Optimizely WYSIWYG Training

Developers and test practitioners alike will benefit from this training. It focuses on advancing skills through the use of the WYSIWYG editor in combination with the audience builder enabling practitioners to increase test velocity while minimizing the involvement of other groups.

 

QA + Debugging

This training is designed for developers, project managers, and analysts that work within the organization’s testing tool. We create a methodology and checklist for quality assurance within a testing program. This includes providing methods to debug tagging for metric setup and custom tagging within an experiment.