Zoho PageSense: Why every experiment starts with empathy

Description

Abi explores why better experimentation does not come from simply running more tests, and why many “conversion problems” are really belief, trust, and contradiction problems showing up late in the journey.

In this webinar, Abi challenges the idea that empathy is about vibes, niceness, or sticky-note theatre. Instead, she reframes empathy as evidence-based understanding: knowing the user’s context, constraints, motivations, perceived risks, and the beliefs they bring with them before they ever reach your website.

Drawing on 20+ years in UX research, experimentation, CRO and digital strategy, Abi shows how teams can improve the quality of their hypotheses by looking beyond the interface. Because when users abandon, hesitate, or fail to convert, the problem may not be the button, the form, or the checkout. It may be that they stopped believing you three steps earlier.

The session introduces the Empathy-First Experiment Loop, a practical model for building better experiments through assumption audits, upstream signal scans, human signal checks, sharper experiment design, and stronger learning reviews. It connects directly to Abi’s wider work on clarity, trust, and upstream optimisation: understanding what people believe before they arrive, what the interface proves when they do, and where contradictions quietly kill confidence.

It covers:

• Why “more tests” is not the same as better learning
• How empathy improves hypothesis quality, experiment design, metric choice, and interpretation
• Why many failed experiments are caused by untested assumptions and upstream contradictions
• How behavioural psychology becomes theatre when it replaces evidence
• The role of AI as both an upstream decision influencer and an accelerant inside experimentation teams
• How to use the Empathy-First Experiment Loop to design better tests

For anyone working in UX, CRO, product, experimentation, analytics, or digital strategy, this session is about how to stop running expensive experiments on the wrong problem and start designing experiments around belief, risk, and context.

Resources from this session

• View the slide deck: Why Every Experiment Starts With Empathy
  The deck includes Abi’s Empathy-First Experiment Loop, a practical model for using assumption audits, upstream signal scans, human signal checks, experiment design, and learning reviews to improve experiment quality.
• Download: The Empathy-First Pre-Flight + Hypothesis Template.