beadexperiment Blog

Four new features are live today, and three more are on the way.

Available now

Anonymous experiments

Until now, every participant needed to be invited by email address. That works well for small groups, but it becomes tedious when you’re running a session with dozens of people.

With anonymous experiments, you can share a single link with all your participants. No email list, no individual invitations. Everyone clicks the same link and joins.

A trade-off to know about: because anyone with the link can join, you give up control over exactly who participates. For workshops, classrooms, and internal team sessions this is usually a fair exchange. If you need to know precisely who is taking part, the invitation-based approach is still available.

Max rounds

In a group session, some participants naturally move faster than others. Without a limit, the fastest people can get several rounds ahead, which makes it hard to discuss results together.

You can now set a maximum number of rounds. Participants who reach the cap wait until you’re ready to continue. When everyone has caught up and you’ve had time to talk through what you’re seeing, simply raise the limit to open up more rounds.

The limit can be changed while the experiment is running, so you don’t need to plan the whole session in advance. Release a round or two at a time and pace the group as you go.

Chart update control

Charts that update in real time are one of the most engaging parts of the experiment. They can also be distracting when you’re trying to talk through what the data means and new samples keep arriving.

You can now temporarily turn off chart updates. Participants can keep submitting samples while you discuss the charts as they currently appear, and you can turn updates back on whenever you’re ready to show the latest results.

Table sorting

The results table now supports sorting. Click a column to sort by name, by totals, or by any other column. This makes it much easier to spot who is at the top or bottom, find a specific participant, or simply put the data in the order that best supports your discussion.

Coming later this year

Custom sample naming

The experiment is called Bead Experiment because of the red and white beads, but the underlying lesson applies to nearly every kind of work. The beads are a stand-in for something else, and the more closely they match your participants’ reality, the more the lesson sticks.

Soon you’ll be able to rename the samples to something that fits your audience. A software team might call them bugs or failed builds. A healthcare team might use medication orders or patient handoffs. A manufacturing team might use parts or inspections. The mechanics stay the same, but the exercise speaks the language of the people doing it.

Inverted goals

By default, the experiment asks participants to minimize an outcome: fewer red beads, fewer defects. That’s the right framing for many situations, but not all of them.

Sometimes the natural goal is to maximize something, such as the percentage of tasks completed correctly, the share of deliveries made on time, or the rate at which a safety checklist is fully completed. In these cases, you’re aiming to approach 100%, or another target.

Inverted goals let you flip the objective. Essentially, you track success rather than defects (one minus the defect rate), and the charts and results reflect that framing. This is a small change on the surface, but it makes the exercise feel more natural for teams who think in terms of reliability and performance rather than errors.

Coming next year

Teams

Today, each experiment is run by an individual account. That works well for solo facilitators, but many organizations have several people who run sessions, and it doesn’t make sense for each of them to carry the full cost on their own.

Next year, we’re introducing teams. A team lets you share the ability to run experiments with colleagues, which reduces the overall cost of using BeadExperiment.com across your group.

How it works: experiments are limited concurrently, meaning a team can only run a set number of experiments at the same time. As long as your experiments don’t overlap, they can be shared freely across the team. One facilitator can run a morning session, another can run an afternoon session, and a third can run something later in the week, all using the same team access.

This is a good fit for training groups, quality and improvement departments, consultants working together, and any organization where running experiments is a shared responsibility rather than one person’s job.

We’d love to hear from you

Your feedback shapes what we build. If you’ve run an experiment recently, tell us what worked, what didn’t, and what you wish the tool could do. And if you’d like me to listen in on a session, just ask.

Thanks for reading, and happy experimenting.