Unintentional Biases

How research can help product teams recognize — and see beyond — their unconscious biases.

Bias is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. To cope with the massive amount of information coming at us, our brains naturally take shortcuts to make sense of the world.

These shortcuts sometimes result in bias. For example, if we took the time to examine every detail of a large furry animal before we decided it was a lion, we might not live to examine the next one. So we take a shortcut: large, furry, scary. It’s a bias against large furry creatures that don’t plan to eat us, but it can save our lives.

These biases don’t always serve us well, though. When we’re developing products, our biases can lead us to take shortcuts that result in suboptimal products and user experiences. One key role of research is to call attention to how our biases are getting in the way of our building the best products to serve and delight our customers. Researchers can help teams become aware of their biases and develop strategies that see beyond them.

Three biases are often prevalent in fast-paced, team-focused product organizations.

1. Experience bias

Once you know or experience something, you can’t “unknow” it. It’s impossible to have the same perspective you had before you learned it. The first time you look at this image, you might see a blob, you might see something else, you might scan it with your eyes trying to make it out.

But once you see the cow you can no longer see it with “unbiased” eyes. It’s hard to not see the cow.

Similarly, it’s very hard for people working on a product to perceive it with the fresh, “unbiased” eyes of our users. All the knowledge we bring to the table — what we set out to design and build, the constraints that drove every product decision, the directions we didn’t go — gets in the way.

Research can help curb experience bias by reminding our teammates of the ways their intimate knowledge of their products is coloring their understanding. Using data we collect through a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods, we can paint a picture of the user’s outside perspective to help teammates see how things looked before they have “seen the cow.”

2. Team bias

We’re also biased by our team’s focus on a particular part of the larger product. We may overestimate the importance of the part we work on and underestimate the importance of the whole. When this happens, we risk “shipping our org chart” — creating a product organized around the teams we’ve created internally, not around the experiences of the people using our products.

To combat team bias, researchers can remember to look at the experiences of users in a holistic way. We can be careful not to simply test the narrow feature our teams are laser-focused on, but to always place those features in the context of the user’s larger intentions and experience.

3. Context bias

Everything we humans do takes place within a larger context of all the external forces that impact our decisions, with or without our awareness. For our users, these forces can include their physical location, the conversations they had before and after using our products, the devices they use to access our products, and much more. Because context can be invisible to us — both our own and the differing contexts of our users — it can be easy to ignore.

Here, too, research can play a powerful role in calling attention to and reducing bias. We can point out to our teammates the aspects of their own context that are invisible to them — particularly the ones that differ significantly from the context of the people who use our products. Artifacts like videos and quotes can help teams recognize context bias and avoid making decisions based on it.

Researchers may not be able to completely root out bias in all its forms, but we’re uniquely positioned to reduce its influence on our teams. One of our most important jobs is to be vigilant about identifying and highlighting sources of bias to help ensure that our products are built for the real people who use them.

Author: Elissa Darnell, Director of Research, Facebook Communities Product Group

With Contributor: Michelle Fulcher, Research Director (alumna) at Facebook

Illustrator: Drew Bardana