It has been estimated that there are more than 10100 possible materials that can be synthesised, grown and optimised. Materials design can be a slow and laborious process, and investigating the full parameter space is a formidable challenge. Machine learning and other advanced statistical techniques will almost certainly accelerate materials development, but many materials scientists are unaware that very basic statistical design methods can accelerate the process. These include the fractional factorial design of experiments, which is more commonly used by product engineers than materials scientists.