The goal of this article is to provide a simple way of structuring and organizing your application in order to achieve clean and scalable iOS code when using split testing.
Practical tips and examples are provided in order for this article to stay as a guideline for real-world app scenarios.
General Problems
Using split testing (also known as an A/B testing), we have endless possibilities for what to test. But in general, we can group the changes needed regarding a split test in the following order:
- Content Changes: Changing only specific parts in a given view or adding/removing specific content based on the given test.
- Design Changes: Testing how changes like colors, typography, or layout can affect our users’ behaviors.
- Behavioral Changes: Changing the behavior of a button action or a screen presentation depending on the split group
The problem is that in all of these categories, huge code duplications can arise.
We need a way to create an easily maintainable code structure for the tests—this is because we’ll have continuous requirements for adding new tests and dropping or modifying old ones. Therefore, we should design with scalability in mind.
Creating a Split Testing Manager
We’ll try to create a generic reusable solution that we could use for our change categories described above.
We’ll first create a protocol that defines the rules to which an object has to conform in order to represent a split test:
protocol SplitTestProtocol {
associatedtype ValueType: Any
static var identifier: String {get}
var value: ValueType {get}
init(group: String)
}
The value field will represent a generic value that’ll be implemented by a concrete Split Testing Object. It will correspond to a color, font, or any attribute that we’re testing for our target goal.
Our identifier will simply be a unique identifier for our test.
Our group will represent which value of the test is currently being tested. It can be a and b or red and green. This all depends on the naming of the values that are decided for a given test.
We’ll also create a manager that’s responsible for getting the value of our split test based on the group stored in our database related to the testing identifier:
class SplitTestingManager {
static func getSplitValue<Value: SplitTestProtocol>(for split: Value.Type) -> Value.ValueType {
let group = UserDefaults.standard.value(forKey: split.self.identifier) as! String
return Value(group: group).value
}
}Content Changes
Suppose that we’re working on a reading application and we decide to give users a free e-book.
Our marketing team has decided to create a split test for giving the book by first asking the users to either:
Share our app on social media
or
Subscribe to our newsletter
Both of these two cases use the same view controller, but a part of the design changes based on the given case. In our view controller, we’ll create a content view area where we’ll be adding different content views.
In this case, we need to create two different views: one for social share and one for the newsletter and add them respectively to our view controller’s content defined area.
Let’s first create an object that holds our view controller style and pass it in the view controller’s initializer:
struct PromotionViewControllerStyle {
let contentView: String
}init(style: PromotionViewControllerStyle) {
self.style = style
super.init(nibName: nil, bundle: nil)
}Basically, the style object currently holds the xib name for the content view of our PromotionViewController.
We can create our Test Object that conforms to our SplitTestProtocol:
class EBookPromotionSplitTest: SplitTestProtocol {
typealias ValueType = PromotionViewControllerStyle
static var identifier: String = "ebookPromotionTest"
var value: PromotionViewControllerStyle
required init(group: String) {
self.value =
group == "social" ?
PromotionViewControllerStyle.init(contentView: "(TwitterView.self)")
: PromotionViewControllerStyle.init(contentView: "(NewsLetterView.self)")
}
}
We can now easily present our view controller with either newsletter or social share content based on our split test:
@IBAction func presentNextVc(_ sender: UIButton) {
let style = SplitTestManager.getSplitValue(for: EBookPromotionSplitTest.self)
let vc = PromotionViewController(style: style)
self.present(vc, animated: true)
}func addContentView() {
let nib = UINib(nibName: style.contentView, bundle: nil)
let view = nib.instantiate(withOwner: nil, options: nil)[0] as! UIView
contentView.addSubview(view)
view.bindFrameToSuperviewBounds()
}Design Changes
Usually, in e-commerce-based applications, it’s popular to change the call to action button design, i.e an add to cart button or purchase button to make it more appealing to the users so it gets more clicks.
We can always use any object of our need for our splitting manager. In this case, suppose we need an object that holds our purchase button color as a value:
class PurchaseButtonColorSplitTest: SplitTestProtocol {
typealias ValueType = UIColor
static var identifier: String = "purchase_button_color"
var value: ValueType
required init(group: String) {
if group == "a" {
self.value = UIColor.red
} else {
self.value = UIColor.green
}
}
}
and we can use it simply from our view as follows:
let color = SplitTestManager.getSplitValue(for: PurchaseButtonColorSplitTest.self)
purchaseButton.backgroundColor = colorSimilarly, any other attributes can be tested, like fonts and margins or any other attribute that needs to change based on our testing.
Behavioral changes
Let’s suppose that we decide to split users into two groups regarding subscriptions in our app:
We want to either
Present a discount dialog when opening the IAP view
or
Present a default view without any dialog
We’ll be using the Strategy Pattern for this example to handle the discount presentation base in our strategy.
Since our SplitTestProtocol contains a generic value, we can create the split testing object that will hold the strategy as its value:
class DiscountSplitTest: SplitTestProtocol {
typealias ValueType = DisountStrategy
static var identifier: String = "iap_discount_type"
var value: DisountStrategy
required init(group: String) {
if group == "offer" {
value = DefaultDiscountStrategy()
}
value = NoDiscountStrategy()
}
}
We can then initialize and present our view controller depending on the specific strategy:
init(discountStrategy: DisountStrategy) {
self.discountStrategy = discountStrategy
super.init(nibName: nil, bundle: nil)
}
func presentDiscoutViewController() {
let strategy = SplitTestManager.getSplitValue(for: DiscountSplitTest.self)
let viewController = DiscountViewController(discountStrategy: strategy)
self.present(viewController, animated: true)
}We now can easily pass our discount responsibility to the DiscountStrategy object and scale it based on our needs without having to change anything in our view controller’s code:
protocol DisountStrategy {
func presentDiscountMessage()
}
struct NoDiscountStrategy: DisountStrategy {
//Provides handling for non discount case
}
struct DefaultDiscountStrategy: DisountStrategy {
//Provides handling for discount case
}override func viewDidAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
super.viewDidAppear(true)
discountStrategy.presentDiscountMessage()
}General Tips
While doing split testing, it’s important to always be careful regarding the following points:
- Always using caching for the test values in order for the app to stay consistent for the user.
- Clean up the code after one specific test is finished. Remove views, fonts, images, and whatever resources you added in the project for the split test.
- Make sure that if something goes wrong you have control over and can disable the A/B test.
In Conclusion
Split testing (also known as A/B testing) is a powerful and effective tool for our apps, but it can easily create messy code if we’re not careful with our code design.
In this article, we’ve created a generic solution that can manage our split testing logic. We gave some real-world app examples and practical tips in order for this article to work as a guide when implementing split testing for your iOS applications.
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