APONE

Academic Platform for ONline Experiments

Open source platform to set up controlled experiments on the Web

University of Exeter

What

A/B testing has become the norm within Web portals to decide what changes should be implemented and which ones discarded. Online users are exposed to two or more different variants (usually changes in interfaces) and according to their behaviour, the best approach is selected.

A/B testing is also used in the academic world to test with real users if the developed approach (usually an algorithm) is better than the state-of-the art approach, or to measure the impact that the changes in specific features have in the users:

Would users make longer queries if we offer them longer search boxes?

Would the abandon rate in online courses be reduced if we increment the number of tests?

Do the films my algorithm recommends receive more clicks than the films recommended by the state-of-the-art algorithm?

Do people get scared, leave and never return if we add sound to our webpage?

APONE is focused on this type of experiments, although it also gives support to quasi-experiments, where variants are not assigned randomly to the study participants, and observational studies, where only one variant is involved.

Why

You may have already created two clients, one per variant, or two versions of the same client. Each user should be exposed to one of them and you will have to save the interactions (events) to later analyze them and decide which variant is better. You know what metrics you want to measure and how many exposures you will approximately need in your experiment (or not). But besides all that, you will also have to solve several technical problems. Some of them are outlined here:

APONE offers a solution to all those problems so the experimenter can focus on the experiment design. The experimenter defines the experiments in the platform through a web GUI, and makes RESTful calls from the client/s to assign a variant to a user or to register information about the interaction. The experimenter just has to develop and deploy the client, include in it calls to APONE to register events, and define and start an experiment in the platform to make it work:


Usage Scenarios

Alice

Alice, an Information Retrieval researcher, wants to investigate whether personalized query suggestions lead to more clicks than non-personalized suggestions. She develops three variants, deploys them on three server instances and starts an APONE experiment: each variant is assigned a URL. The users all receive the same APONE endpoint and are automatically assigned and redirected to the different variants depending on the experimental conditions (e.g. the user ID saved in cookies). The clicks on a personalized suggestion are registered from the variants. Alice can check in real-time APONE’s dashboard for the progress of her experiments, including the number of exposures and the registered events per exposure. Once ended, she proceeds to filter and download the information saved to analyze it.


Bob

Bob has designed three different search boxes for the site search of his university. Design A is the most radical and thus Bob wants just 10% of the university website visitors to receive it, designs B and C should receive an equal fraction of all visitors. He hypothesizes that design A will lead to longer queries. Query length is thus the information to register. He creates a corresponding experiment on APONE where each variant has a variable and a value associated (eg. query-length = 20). For every visitor of the university website, an AJAX call requests the platform (using their session ID as key) for the corresponding variant. The search box with the received query length is displayed and the lengths of the issued queries are registered in the platform, also with an AJAX request. After 5,000 exposures in total the experiment is complete and the standard design is automatically returned to the visitors.


Charlie

Charlie runs a similar experiment to Bob’s for his own website but he thinks that the caption, length and color of the search box may have different impacts on the query length. He defines a multivariate experiment to automatically expose his website users to all the possible combinations. He assigns a script to the experiment where the three variables are assigned different values. For every visitor of his website, it request the variant to the platform, which will include the combination of values of those variables. In this case the requests to APONE and changes to the search box are made from the server to avoid malicious users modifying the experimental conditions.


Dave’s course

Dave teaches a graduate course where students have to reproduce A/B experiments. The students deploy their clients in different public servers and associate the URL where they are hosted to the experiments defined in APONE. Each student accesses the platform to participate in each other’s experiment: by clicking a button, they are assigned randomly to a running experiment. APONE ensures that no user can access several variants of the same experiment or participate multiple times in it once they complete it (the experimenter decides when an experiment is completed by sending a signal to the platform). Dave can check the status of all the experiment as well as the most active users in a leaderboard.


Architecture

APONE builds upon PlanOut to define experiments, and offers RESTful endpoints and a web GUI to easily create, manage and monitor them. Therefore the platform is completely independent of the programming language of the client or the domain of the experiments you want to run.


APONE delegates authentication to Twitter’s OAuth, and makes use of RabbitMQ as message broker to digest events sent by clients. The events are then stored in a MongoDB backend. All experiments and collected events can be managed and monitored in real-time through a Web interface implemented in JavaScript.

How

Quick Setup

  1. Go to the running instance of APONE we provide, and create a new experiment from the menu Experiments::Create new. Main fields to fill in are:
    • Variant name and client URL where it is located (eg. SearchBoxA, http://myclient/myVariantSearchBoxA). You can have as many variants as you want. One of them has to be the control.
    • Configuration name, optionally deadline and/or maximum experimental units to complete the experiment (eg. maximum number of users), and distribution (percentage of experimental units assigned to each variant).

  2. Start the experiment selecting it from Experiments:Manage and clicking on ‘Start’ (you can start/stop the experiment as many times as you want).

  3. Develop your client and host it in a public server, hosting the different variants in the URLs specified in the definition of the experiment. Use APONE’s Javascript Library to easily interact with APONE to get the variant assigned to a user, register events, check if the user has completed the experiment, etc.

  4. Monitor the experiment from APONE’s menu Monitoring::Experiments, and download the data registered from Events::Manage in order to decide the best variant.

Users can participate in the running experiments from APONE’s interface Monitoring::Users, just by clicking on ‘Participate in an experiment’, or they can be redirected to the assigned variant from the following endpoint: /service/redirect/{experiment identifier}

Advanced

Experiments can also be defined in PlanOut language, where each variant is assigned pairs of key-values. In that case, we can easily create multivariate experiments and we are able to overwrite those key-values, which is necessary to run quasi-experiments.

A user guide explains in more detail how to define, run and control an experiment using a demo Client (Client Example, or ClientE) and the running instace of APONE we provide, where you can also find three running experiments with ClientE for demonstration purposes. ClientE and most examples in the user guide are focused on the Information Retrieval domain.

It is also possible to download and install the platform from Github following the installation instructions.

Current Features

Future Features



Photo by University of Exeter / CC BY

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