A coffee-table book for the 10th anniversary of The Conference Known As Conversion Hotel.

In 2023, Conversion Hotel celebrated its 10th edition. To mark the occasion, I wrote, illustrated and designed a printed coffee-table book capturing the talks, people, stories, running jokes, sharp ideas and magnificent weirdness of the event.

It was part conference write-up, part visual record, part love letter to the optimisation community, and part proof that some conferences are not just events. They are tiny temporary civilisations with better snacks.

Written, illustrated and designed by Abi Hough.
Created for Conversion Hotel 2023.

What this book is

The Book of Tonns is a printed coffee-table book created for the 2023 edition of The Conference Known As Conversion Hotel.

It brings together keynote summaries, pitch competition notes, partner presentations, unconference moments, attendee stories, visual jokes, illustrations, references and the kind of strange details that make Conversion Hotel feel unlike any other event in the optimisation world.

This was not a quick recap slapped together after the event while pretending bullet points are content. It was a full editorial and design project: written, illustrated, structured and assembled as a physical book people could actually keep, flick through and remember.

A proper artefact. Not a LinkedIn post in a trench coat.

Why 2023 mattered

2023 was Conversion Hotel’s 10th anniversary edition.

The event had started in 2014 with a much smaller group of attendees and grew over the years. But as the event became bigger, the thing that made it special risked becoming weaker: the intimacy, conversations and quality of human connection.

So Conversion Hotel changed.

From 2019 onwards, the event shifted into The Conference Known As Conversion Hotel, with more emphasis on discussion, social time, attendee participation and meaningful connection.

The 2023 book captures that evolution: not just the talks on stage, but the culture around them.

The result is a record of a conference that has always been more than a sequence of presentations. It is a place where serious optimisation thinking sits happily next to beer testing, island chaos, unconference debates, bitterballen challenges, sea dips and the occasional deeply questionable idea that somehow becomes tradition.

What’s inside

The book covers the main moments from Conversion Hotel 2023, including:

Keynote summaries

1. The Psychology Of Disappointment: Michael Aagaard
2. Selling Magic Beans: Tim Stewart (TRS Digital)
3. Unlocking The Collaboration Bonus: Lucia Van Den Brink (Increase Conversion Rate)
4. The Future Of Experimentation: André Morys (konversionsKRAFT)
5. Experimenting Towards Long Covid Recovery: Simone Neeling (VodafoneZiggo)
6. How T0 Make SEO & CRO A Dazzling Duo: Annegien Bruins Slot (Briljante Geesten)
7. Listen To Your Users And Stop Doing Stupid Things: Karl Gilis (AG Consult)
8. What’s Still Wrong With Conversion Copywriting?: Joanna Wiebe (Copy Hackers)
9. The Seven Deadly Sins Of User Research: Els Aerts (AG Consult)
10. How To Make Fun Of Conversion Hotel: Greg Shapiro (GregShapiro.com)

Keynote Pitch Presentations

The book also covers the keynote pitch competition, including the speakers who stepped up to pitch ideas on gamification, tough projects, running and experimentation, selling drugs online, and getting SEO and CRO to work together without everyone needing a lie down.

1. To Play Or Not To Play: Igoris Ryklys (Swedbank)
2. How To Manage Tough Projects & Make Clients Happy: Rosario Toscano (rosariotoscano.com)
3. Running & Experimentation: Laura Forster (Upreply)
4. How To Sell Drugs Online: Roxanne Van Hassel (eHealth Ventures Group)

Partner Presentations

The book includes partner presentation summaries from Kameleoon, VWO, Optimizely, SiteSpect, Contentsquare, Exatom and others.

1. Making Your Experimentation Dreams Come True: Kameleoon (Christoph Rottler-Lavoie, Justin Früh, Natalie Schairer)
2. Bigger & Better: 4 Steps To Successfully Scale Your Experimentation Program: VWO (Jan Marks)
3. From Test Tubes To Teasers: Experimentation Collaboration and Other Wonders: Optimizely (Dejan Dragusin & Tanka Poudel)
4. Server Side A/B Testing: SiteSpect (Erwin Kerk)
5. Finding Solutions Your Customers Actually Need: Joshua Kreuger (DPG Media), Bas Pleune (Contentsquare)
6. 4 Form Issues You Wouldn’t Expect: Exatom (Bart de Fluiter, Stephan van den Bremer)

The wider event

Beyond the formal sessions, the book captures what makes Conversion Hotel distinctive:

• unconference sessions
• panel discussions
• networking moments
• The Saints of CRO
• Magic Makers
• 10 years of Conversion Hotel
• references and further reading
• the bits you absolutely were told not to read but probably did anyway

The craft behind it

This book was created as part of an ongoing tradition.

The first Conversion Hotel conference book was created after the 2019 event as a thank you to Ton Wesseling and as a way to share the knowledge, humour and community spirit from the conference more widely.

By 2023, that had grown into a much bigger creative effort.

For this anniversary edition, I handled:

• the writing
• the illustrations
• the layout
• the structure
• the visual storytelling
• the editorial tone
• the speaker and session summaries
• the jokes, diagrams, strange captions and lovingly feral details

The aim was not to produce neutral conference proceedings. Nobody needs that level of beige in their life.

The aim was to create something that felt like the event itself: useful, funny, sharp, slightly chaotic, very human and full of ideas worth remembering.

Why it belongs on UU3

UU3 has always sat at the intersection of UX, experimentation, research, communication and making complex ideas easier to understand.

This book is a good example of that work in another form.

It takes a dense, multi-day conference and turns it into something structured, readable, visual and memorable. It translates talks into takeaways. It captures the human texture of the event. It preserves the thinking without sanding off the personality.

In other words: it is content design, synthesis, illustration, event storytelling and industry knowledge-sharing all bundled into one large printed object that probably took far more time than was sensible.

Naturally.

Selected themes from the book

Across the sessions, several themes kept returning:

• understanding expectations before trying to optimise outcomes
• selling ideas without the ick
• collaboration as a multiplier for experimentation
• changing organisational culture, not just running tests
• using experimentation thinking in real life, not just on websites
• making SEO, CRO and UX work together instead of politely ruining each other’s work
• listening to users before doing stupid things
• using the right words, not corporate sludge
• doing user research properly, not poisoning yourself with bad data
• remembering that conferences work best when humans actually talk to each other

A radical idea. Possibly dangerous.