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User Segmentation 3: Conducting A/B Tests with Firebase

A/B Testing is testing different configurations of your app with different segments of your users to gather data on which configuration gives the highest user engagement, retention, etc.

This tutorial requires a fair understanding of Remote Config so if you don’t know about that yet, learn how to do it.

How to create an A/B Test

  1. Go to the Firebase Console and navigate to Grow > Remote Config. There you should see an A/B Testing button on the right edge of the screen.
  2. Go through the setup filling out your experiment basics, variants, and goal. In the experiment basics is where you can select a segment of your users to test with. You will also determine

In the experiment basics is where you can select a segment of your users to test with. You will also determine your control groups in variants by different values in remote config parameters.

That’s all there really is. From here on, you should see a dashboard of your experiment. Before you start it, you want to test all its variant on one or more test devices.

Validating the Test on a Test Device

Before you run your experiment, you’re going to want to test it on one of your devices first.

You’re first going to need your device’s Firebase registration token. You can easily get this by dumping this log anywhere in your app.

Log.d("IID_TOKEN", FirebaseInstanceId.getInstance().getToken());

Once you have your token, go back to your experiment in the console and open up the details. Click Manage Test Devices, paste in your token and select the variant to test on that device. Once you save, the app on that device should already be receiving the experiment.

Conclusion

A/B Testing is vital to a successful update, or otherwise avoiding a destructive one.

Perhaps you know about Snapchat‘s recent update which drew a lot of backlash (From me as well. The UI is a total mess). I noticed they were releasing the update to segments of their users at a time. I was affected by this update later than others.

However, they didn’t seem to retaliate from this update that drew all the backlash. Normally this would have been destructive to the app and cause users to switch to another similar app, but Snapchat is a monopoly in that sense. Even as it stands, no other app shares stories and snaps better than Snapchat.

Check out the other parts of this course

 

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