The confirmation bias in UX research — DAY 97
The confirmation bias is a very dangerous cognitive bias that can directly impact on any designer’s work by influencing the most initial and supportive phase of the process: the UX research.
It’s complex, it’s behavioral, it’s psychologic.
It’s what makes the designer focus his research phase on confirming his assumptions instead of on understanding and analyzing it. It’s about analyzing only what comes in handy to confirm a theory or an assumption. It’s a common behavior of human beings to try to be right and to confirm their wisely. Fortunately, though, for all of us, we can, at least, minimize the effects of this cognitive bias by observing the following steps:
- Make sure you analyze the whole context, not isolating and prioritizing results that confirm your thesis;
- While building your analysis and analyzing it, try very hard to prove you are wrong. Deconstruct your hypothesis instead of trying to confirm it. This will make your result more consistent and will give arguments if you, eventually, confirm it as true.
- Forget your ego and don’t avoid to be wrong. Ask people what they think and when they answer, think about it, consider it. Test to be wrong and if you are, iterate your assumption and come up with something new.
The confirmation bias is a very dangerous one because is about you against yourself, so transparency, humility, and resilience are the best ways to avoid it and to create consistent research that will validate complex assumptions and support excellent results in UX or any other field.
#100DaysAboutUsers
Roberto Pesce — aboutusers.com
Follow the challenge on Facebook!
