How to overcome your biases
UX designing is quite a difficult task. You design for others, not for you. Therefore, you always need to keep the end-user as your priority and do your best to make their requirements satisfied. However, it’s human to have biases. In other words, favoring against something knowing very little information about it. It’s like judging a book by its cover. For a UX designer, having biases is a bit disadvantageous. It narrows down the information you can collect from UX researches and usability studies. Even though it might be difficult to get over your biases completely, you can always give it a try. But before that, you need to have a clear picture of different kinds of biases. In this article, I will draw your attention to five biases; confirmation bias, false consensus bias, primacy bias, recency bias, implicit/unconscious bias, and the sunk cost fallacy.
Now think you come up with a hypothesis during your usability research. You are so confident that your hypothesis is true. Then you try to find out evidence to prove it. In other words, you try to get information from the user, that confirms your assumption. This is known as confirmation bias. No need of worrying as you can avoid it by asking open-ended questions from users. Instead of asking ‘Isn’t this app is easy to navigate?’, ask ‘What do you think about the navigation of this app?’. Then the user can speak what he really thinks. Always do your best to listen actively when users are speaking aloud their thoughts, and try to use a large sample of users with diversity for your usability studies.
Think that you have an idea or a design in your mind, and you overestimate yourself assuming that so many people will agree with your idea. This is false consensus bias. This will sometimes go so far as making you think that people who do not agree with you are abnormal. You can avoid false consensus bias by identifying your assumptions and articulating them. Keep a positive thought but don’t go overestimate over your ideas. Have a large sample of users to gather enough information related to your study.
When you are listening to someone, have you ever felt like you remember what the other person said when he started talking or what he said when he ended speaking? Then you are likely to have primary or/and recency biases. Primary bias is you remember the first participant of the test most strongly than others. Recency bias means you strongly remember the last participant, or you only remember the last part of the testing as it’s the most recent thing that happened. You can easily overcome this bias by detailed note-taking. Write down every tiny detail said by all the participants that you think is important for your study. Then even though you forget you have everything written down in your notes.
Assume you are designing an app to improve children’s reading. Hence your end-users are children. Therefore, you need to do usability studies with children to get their feedback. However, there may be instances where parents also use the app to help their children. So if you exclude parents from researches as they are not end-users, then it is an implicit/unconscious bias. You should not be limited to a set of identified profiles; same race, same educational background, same gender, or same age group. Always try to have diversity among the sample of users. Try to reach both end-user and general users as they both play a major role in your design. That way you can eliminate this bias.
Lastly, we have the sunk cost fallacy bias. When you are doing a project sometimes it might take longer than you assumed to finish the project. You need to make sure that users are fully satisfied, hence you will need to run several usability tests and iterate over your designs. So the longer you spend time on a project, it’s natural for you to get a feeling that your project has failed, or your project will not succeed. You may get negative thoughts and sunken enthusiasm. Therefore, always break down your project into several phases which can be outlined into designated outcomes. Then at the end of each phase, upon its success, you can decide either to proceed or halt.
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Having biases is not something negative about you. It’s just natural. However, understanding and trying to overcome your biases is the important thing. Ask one of your designer friends to be honest and point out your biases in his perspective. You all can get together as a design team and pinpoint each other biases. Remember, this is not to criticize others. It is to improve yourself and identify what biases you have.
During UX researches and usability tests, it’s important to choose your words carefully. Just because it’s your design and you have put lots of effort into it, does not mean that users should appreciate or be happy about your work. Your goal is to get their honest feedback. Avoid questions that have framing effects where users feel like they are bounded to a particular answer. Now if you ask, ‘Isn’t the color selection of this design is eye-catching?’ the user may felt ‘yes’ is the answer that he should give. Instead, alter your question like ‘What do you think about the color selection of this design?’ allowing users to express their ideas freely.
As the designer, you have a well understanding of what you are designing. Therefore, in case you want to ask a question like ‘What is your overall impression of this product?’ you may tend to give multiple choice answers. You may put your thoughts into the answers (‘I like the color theme of this product’, ‘I love how the layout is arranged’, ‘This is an excellent app!’, …) and will sometimes give ‘other’ as an option to select as well. Then users have to either select one of the answers that you have given them to choose or skip by selecting the ‘other’ option. This arises confirmation bias. Hence always try to avoid specific language.
During usability tests, you should limit guiding the users the way you want. For example, to copy a text, you can either press ‘ctrl+c’ or select the text, right-click on it, and select ‘copy’. You should understand that users may do this task in both ways because everyone does not think the same. Therefore, you should not correct them, if the user flow he is taking to complete a particular task is different from the user flow that you prefer.
Always be mindful of your tone. As the designer, you might be really proud and happy about your design. However, when you describe users about the design if you sound really confident, enthusiastic, and happy users may not be bold enough to tell you the negative thoughts they have. This is really disadvantageous since what you require the most is their honest thoughts. Hence, always try to have a neutral tone.
The final tip is to be open-minded. Pay attention to all the information and users equally. Don’t prioritize one over the other. This way you can avoid primary and recency biases.
I repeat, having biases is human. But understanding your biases and doing your best to overcome them is what makes a good designer!
