What is cognitive bias?

We are bombarded with millions of bits of information everyday.

Owing to evolution, our brains have learnt taking shortcuts to understand and process this information. Cognitive bias refers to these shortcuts.

Cognitive biases help us make decisions more quickly. But, their fault lies in the fact that they are often based on hunches and incomplete information.

For example, anytime someone hears that 1/10 people could be allergic to something, they always consider themselves to be in the unaffected 9 unless proven otherwise. This is the result of cognitive bias.

Our brains are prone to cognitive biases because they help us process information efficiently. Without these biases, we’d be spending an unimaginable amount of time trying to make simple decisions.

We all possess cognitive biases, and they are useful in our everyday lives. However, it is essential to understand how false assumptions could influence design decisions.

And, just like designers might have biases when designing products, users can have them too when using the products. Designer’s must design considering this fact.

Importance of identifying a designer's cognitive bias

The process of UX design is a long one. There are different stages in the design process where bias could seep in.

For instance, every good project starts with a discovery phase. This involves research about the business, its users, competitors, the general market, etc. Here is where designers align their goals with that of the stakeholders’.

Now imagine this, during the UX research phase, you come across a user requesting a certain feature. The same feature was also mentioned by your colleague a few days ago. You put the 2 and 2 together, and your brain concludes that this feature is important and requested by most users. Whereas, in reality, that is not the case, and you are basing your conclusions on incomplete information.

This is Availability bias at play.

According to Wikipedia, availability bias is a cognitive bias in which we rely on immediate examples that come to our mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.

Another real-life, relatable example would be when you get a new haircut and suddenly start noticing many people with a similar hairstyle. Although it doesn’t matter much when you think a lot of people have the same haircut as yours, it certainly does when a designer arrives at a conclusion based on incomplete data.

As a Designer, if you allow cognitive bias to seep into your product design process, the product you are designing is no longer optimized and might not be able to meet your stakeholder’s goals.

Now that we know how a designer’s cognitive bias could impact the product design process, let us also understand why, as a designer, you need to consider your users’ biases when designing.

Importance of identifying a user’s cognitive bias

As designers, we can circumvent our cognitive biases, but it would be unrealistic to expect users to do the same.

Take the example of Familiarity bias.

Familiarity bias states that people trust what they’re familiar with. Thus, if you design a product that offers an experience that strives too far from the general experience in the industry, there is a high probability that you will experience low user onboarding and a high user drop-off rate.

However, as designers, we can also easily leverage biases to benefit users and stakeholders.

Consider the principle of least effort.

This cognitive bias states that when faced with multiple options for getting something done, people tend to choose the option that requires the least effort.

Most people are not casually looking for products and services in their industry. They do so when they are faced with an issue out of their routine that they do not have the tools to solve. As a designer, you could leverage the principle of least effort in such a scenario.

While other products would have a lengthy onboarding process, you could offer people a way to resolve their issues without any onboarding involved while asking for the absolute minimum information required for completing the task.

This would help your products increase their adoption rate and become the go-to solution for certain problems.

We’ve only talked about 3 biases so far and the importance of identifying and leveraging them during the product design process.

Further, we expand on a few more common biases.

List of common cognitive biases

Social proof

Do you know how people always like to check customer reviews before buying something online? That is social proof in action.

Most of us prefer purchasing after validating our decision through reviews. The reason being, we feel at peace knowing what most people have felt after buying something.

Social proof derives from a deeply rooted psychological bias.

It implies that the best way to make a decision is to look at the decision others have made. The is because we believe that the majority knows best and it’s a safe choice.

You can see this in practice when buying something online. Every product has a customer review section, which shows the general sentiment of people who have bought the product. It also displays the number of people who have reviewed the product.

Anchoring effect

The anchoring effect refers to the cognitive bias wherein an individual’s decisions are based on a reference point or an anchor.

A great example of anchoring bias is seen during the checkout process of some food delivery apps. The payment phase always has an option to tip your delivery person, and there’s often a default amount mentioned in the payment tab. This leads people to base their tips off of this anchor in the app.

In the example above, ‘Most Tipped’ acts as an anchor.

You’ll also notice this when buying gift cards online.

Bandwagon effect

Also known as Herd behaviour, the bandwagon effect refers to people’s tendency to do or believe certain things because everybody else seems to be doing it.

This is the reason companies like to show off their partner companies or testimonials on the homepage to convince potential users to try their products.

Scarcity effect

Scarcity bias refers to people’s tendency to attach high value to limited things.

You might have noticed many eLearning and eCommerce vendors promoting sales and offers as ‘limited time only’ to draw more customers.

Conclusion

There are multiple ways a designer can get affected by cognitive bias in the product design process.

For example, a team of designers believe that their product is too complicated for users.

To confirm if this, they go through product reviews on popular platforms. They search through reviews in such a way that they find a disproportionate number of negative reviews conforming to their bias. And are misled to conclude that the product is difficult to use.

To conclude, a designer’s cognitive bias in product design can lead to mistakes in the design process. And this may cause the user’s needs to be overlooked.

It is, thus, very important, as a designer, to ensure that your decisions are not influenced by biases, and consider the potential biases users hold when using products.