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Tie an experiment to a surface to let others working on that surface see your experiment. This allows you to plan experiments better. If you experiment on the same part of an app or a page, or if there’s another reason your experiments mustn’t collide, you can coordinate them using exclusivity tags. You can also decide to run them at distinct points in time. Interaction effects between experiments are rare, see this report by Microsoft. For this reason, many companies, including Spotify, only coordinate experiments that directly influence each other. For example, if two teams work on the design of a page and the work by one of the teams is only functional if the other team’s work doesn’t change the page, they should coordinate their experiments.

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The Global Surface

Every account has a global surface. All experiments are automatically part of the global surface and it’s impossible to run experiment outside of this surface. Use this surface to configure settings that should apply to all your organization’s experiments.

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Create Surfaces

Give your surfaces names that:
  • are self-explanatory, so that people from different parts of the organization can understand what the surface is and what it isn’t
  • don’t use organization-specific words, as the structure of the organization often changes more often than the product structure
Describe your surfaces with:
  • a short sentence about what the surface is
  • examples of typical experiments that should run on this surface
  • examples of experiments that you suspect your colleagues might think should run on this surface, but that in fact shouldn’t
For an e-commerce website, examples of surfaces could be:
  • Home page
  • Checkout
  • Products
  • Search
  • Customer support
Each surface is its own area in the product. Multiple teams can work on the same surface.
Experiments can belong to multiple surfaces at the same time. All experiments belong to the global surface.

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Surface Size

When you start to exceed 30-40 live experiments in a surface at any given time, you should consider splitting up the surface into smaller surfaces to lower the load of the experimenter. The purpose of surfaces is to make it easier for experimenters to keep track of experiments that are relevant for their experiment. If there are too many experiments on a surface, this is overwhelming.

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Use Surfaces to Coordinate Experiments

Create exclusivity groups and holdbacks on surfaces to coordinate experiments. Go to the Surface tab and click Settings in the top right corner. Watch this video to get a quick overview of how to use exclusivity groups to coordinate experiments in Confidence.
Learn how to create exclusivity groups and holdbacks in the documentation.

Surfaces Introduction

Overview of surfaces in Confidence

Surface Settings

Configure surface settings

Exclusive Experiments

Make experiments mutually exclusive

A/B Tests

Run A/B tests on surfaces