Experimental Design
Experimental design is the discipline of planning studies so that observed effects can be attributed to specific causes rather than to chance or confounding factors. It determines what to vary, what to hold constant, and how to assign subjects to conditions.
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Intro
Experimental Design
Experimental design is how you plan a study so the results mean something. Without a design, you have data but no way to tell whether an observed difference is real, caused by what you think, or an artifact of how you collected it.
Why design matters
Observational data is cheap but ambiguous. You see that customers who use feature X have higher retention, but you cannot tell whether X caused the retention or whether already-loyal customers are more likely to try X. Correlation is not causation — and the gap between them is exactly what experimental design closes.
A well-designed experiment isolates the effect of interest by controlling everything else. It tells you: this difference is real, it was caused by this treatment, and here is how confident you should be.
The core elements
Every experiment has:
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