What a Bear Taught Us About A/B Testing
- Emre Ay
- Sep 29, 2025
- 3 min read
Forget Your Personas, You Need a Bear… or The Honey Pot Method: Finding What Your Users Really Want
Let’s Talk About A/B Testing. And a Bear.
But for a moment, forget the heat maps, the conversion funnels, and the endless debate over button colors. Let’s talk about a beekeeper from Trabzon, a very persistent bear, and some of the world’s most expensive honey.
The story goes like this: in 2019, a beekeeper named İbrahim Sedef was having his hives raided by a bear. After trying and failing to secure his facility, he decided to turn his pest into a panellist. He set up a table with four types of honey: Chestnut, Flower, Cherry, and the world-renowned Anzer honey.
The bear showed up, and without hesitation, it consistently went for the Anzer honey first. To be sure this wasn’t a fluke, İbrahim rearranged the honey pots night after night. Yet, no matter the layout, the bear always chose the Anzer.
He didn’t even taste the cherry jam we squeezed in between. The big boy knows what tastes good. — Ibrahim SEDEF
The story was about more than a bear with expensive taste. It was the purest, most honest user test I have ever seen.
Three UX Lessons from a Bear
The bear’s behavior offers a masterclass in user research. Here are three lessons we can learn from it:
1. Actions Speak Louder Than Words
The bear has no agenda. It has no biases, no desire to please the researcher, and no ego. Its only goal is to get the best honey, and it demonstrates its preference through direct, unfiltered action.
This is in stark contrast to human users in a focus group, who might tell you they love your new design to be polite, but then never actually use the feature. The truth isn’t in what users say; it’s in what they do. Behavioral data, like click maps, session recordings, and conversion rates, tells the real story. The bear is our heat map. It shows us exactly where the value is, no commentary needed.
2. True Testing Requires Rigor
The most brilliant part of the beekeeper’s experiment? He kept changing the position of the honey pots. If he hadn’t, he might have wrongly concluded that the bear simply preferred the pot on the far left. By randomising the layout, he isolated the key variable: the product itself.
This is the foundation of a good A/B test. When we change five things on a landing page at once, we learn nothing. Real insight comes from changing one variable at a time, a headline, an image, a call to action, and measuring its specific impact. The beekeeper wasn’t just testing; he was conducting a rigorous experiment.
3. Your Biggest “Problem” Can Be Your Best Feedback Source
Initially, the bear was a problem. It was a pest, a threat to the business. But the beekeeper reframed the situation, turning his biggest problem into his most valuable data source. He found an opportunity for feedback where others would only see a loss.
This is a powerful lesson for how we should view customer complaints, support tickets, and bug reports. These aren’t annoyances to be dealt with; they are free consultations showing us exactly where our product is weakest. The key is being willing to listen, even when the feedback comes from an unexpected or frustrating source.
Find Your Anzer Honey
Our job as designers and product builders is to set out the “honey pots” for our users and observe what they actually choose. We need to focus less on what they tell us and more on what their actions show us.
So, the next time you’re stuck between design options or drowning in conflicting opinions, ask yourself:
“What would the bear do?”
The answer will probably lead you straight to your own Anzer honey.
P.S. Yes, This Is a True Story.
And for the sceptics in the room, the tale of the gourmet bear is 100% real. Here’s the original news report to prove it.
A quick heads-up, the article is in Turkish, which is a perfect final usability test for Translate, isn’t it?
A final, respectful note. The man behind this brilliant experiment, beekeeper İbrahim Sedef, passed away a few years ago. His wonderful curiosity has given us all a timeless lesson in understanding our “users.” May he rest in peace.
