Managing your biases as a UX designer.

Peace Solomon
Bootcamp
Published in
4 min readAug 8, 2022

If we are brutally honest, biases are prevalent among us humans. One that may be the most relatable would be the beauty bias. If someone approached you, you would be more eager to listen to the person if you consider them to be attractive. I like how the Cambridge Dictionary defines the word “bias”:-

The action of supporting or opposing a particular person or thing in an unfair way, because of allowing personal opinions to influence your judgment.

This article will explore UX designers’ various biases and how to manage or overcome them. Failure to do so may result in adverse effects for the design, business, brand, and even the designer. The design may fail in terms of usability, ease of use, functionality, and visual appeal. This in turn, means that the business may not achieve its goal, which may be engagement, retention and monetization. As for the designer, failure may mean a reduction of clients that would trust them to handle projects.

The truth is that having preferences are entirely normal because we have different backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures; thus, we tend to prefer a certain thing or way over the other. For example, as a Yoruba person, you probably prefer to eat swallow with your hand, unlike a Western person who would prefer to use cutlery. However, such preference should not cloud your judgement in any situation. As much as you can, staying objective while making decisions is critical. This is why you should also use data to back up your decision.

As UX designers, biases are more prominent during the early stage of a design, that is, user research. Some of these biases may include:

Confirmation bias:

You already have a hypothesis or an assumption; you then center your research around proving it. As a result, you filter insights from user surveys or interviews that do not support your hypothesis.

How can you manage this bias?

  1. Be open-minded and ask open-ended questions: You must be willing to listen to people with an open mind, eliminate all already-formed biases you may have and ask open-ended questions. Such open-ended questions could include: “Can you describe your experience using this feature?”.
  2. Interview a large pool of participants with diverse opinions, beliefs, age groups or backgrounds. Try as much as possible to get many perspectives to ensure that your design is inclusive.
Confirmation bias by NNGroup
Confirmation bias by NNGroup

Recency bias

When having a conversation or conducting a user interview, the last thing the respondent said may be the easiest to remember. That may be the only thing you include in your note, forgetting the other things the respondent mentioned earlier that may be essential for the project.
How can you manage this bias?

  1. Record your interviews or make your notes thorough: I prefer to do both during an interview because the truth is we are humans, and it is possible to leave out some things. Making a recording makes room for referring back to the interview and getting key insights.
  2. Employ the same style while asking interviewees questions or preferably ask the same questions. This is helpful when taking notes; you can use the allocated numbers for the questions.

Friendliness or social desirability bias

This is when you nudge the user into giving a favourable response during an interview or in a survey, especially since the response may prove a hypothesis. Respondents may also exercise this by giving answers they feel you want to hear or would be most helpful for your project.
How can you manage this bias?

  1. Use indirect questions: People are more willing to give accurate answers when being asked to state it from a third party’s perspective. Ask the respondent what they believe a specific or an average user would think about a feature.
  2. Reiterate the research goal and ensure that the respondent is fully aware that giving quality and honest feedback is essential for the project’s success.
  3. Be careful with your body language, users are watchful and must maintain a neutral look throughout the interview.

Anchoring bias

Anchoring bias equates to a person jumping to conclusions. You hold on to a person’s first words and disregard the rest as irrelevant. You frame your research around those words and revolve your design around them, leading to the production of a solution that would be the least useful for users.
How can you manage this bias?

  1. Encourage respondents to speak their minds freely and state their out-of-the-box ideas. Try to implement such ideas and test if they work, do not immediately cancel them out.
  2. Exercise proper care when crafting problem statements, user stories and personas, and ensure that they reflect your users’ needs and pain points.

The End.

These are some of the biases you must manage as a UX designer, especially if you want to build relevant products in today’s world. I will be back with updates on the things I have been up to, but I hope this is helpful✨

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Bootcamp
Bootcamp

Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Peace Solomon
Peace Solomon

Written by Peace Solomon

Documenting my product design and AI/ML journey. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/peacesolomon

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