Know Thy Biases: a Checklist

I was chatting to (good friend) Kim about how non-tech products evolve and we got talking about how amazingly effective checklists are for improving systems, and being product people (of course) we looked at how we could use checklists to make better products.

One I made myself and I try to use a lot is a list of cognitive biases. I use it to sanity check any ideas I have before bring it to the team

Don’t use it for evil!

Anchoring Bias (Focalism)

For anything where there is no broader context, people use the first piece of information as the anchoring context for all other pieces of information

The classic marketing example of this is the three options given on any pricing page for a product. By having the low quantity option at a high per unit cost it frames the other two options as better value.

To reduce this when thinking about ideas I try and isolate any assumptions and explicitly write them down. Even simple stuff like what percentage of users have iPhones and I find from there you can sometimes dissect out any underlying assumptions.

Availability Heuristic

People overestimate the value of information they happen to have and discount information they don’t.

The most obvious demonstration is how unlikely events skew people’s perceptions of the world; if you see a news report about shark attacks you’re more likely to think shark attacks happen.

I’d really watch out for this when you see competitors product’s, just because they are doing doesn’t mean users are doing it. If you’ve got data and stories why that feature won’t work stick to your guns!

Confirmation Bias

People filter for information that agrees with my pre-existing ideas. Given how much data you can now get from your product, you can find and contort data to tell any story you want.

Special shout out to the Facebook newsfeed for this, people interact with stories that agree with their world views making those and similar stories appear more.

A great example is when people have a story or persona mapped out and you build a feature based on that. When the analytics come back the feature wasn’t used as much as hoped, people disregard that the feature isn’t being used and keep pushing the old personas

Conservatism Bias

People tend to insufficiently revise their beliefs when shown new evidence. So always be evaluating all the evidence and discount the past to account for this bias.

I find this one amazing, given how everyone knows how fast the tech world moves. Almost any serious web based business will have someone coming after you in every business axis (lower price, higher abstraction etc)

And remember success hides problems.

Zero-Risk Bias

People ❤️ Certainty. People will spend excessive amounts to reduce risk to something to zero, even when you could get 80% of the way

This is where your 80:20-ing really pay dividends, by cutting a small amount of edge cases you can get most of the functionality, but you need to fight this bias.

I always liked the idea of a product where you could price based on this, if you could somehow price an unreliable product at X then use this bias to charge 10x for the reliable version.

Overconfidence

People are bad at estimating how good they are at tasks and experts are the worse for it.

Half of project management is managing how bad developers are estimating tasks, but users are just as bad at this too. I always try and push the idea of helping users much harder and further than what testers say they need.

Pro-Innovation Bias

Developers and Designers love new technologies, unfortunately people don’t. I find developers/designers will go to amazing mental contortions to justify using something new.

Apple are great for this, genuinely do believe at an institutional level they are good at not changing something just for the sake of change.

This is a strange one thou, because it’s a lot easier to hire people to work on new technologies, even if they aren’t 100% the optimal technologies

Anyways, this is a start, let me know if you have an more to add.

Edit: a few people recommend this (excellent) article by Buster Benson: https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18#.xsz1dcaht