How to reduce cognitive biases in Product Design: Part 2

Part 1 summarised how our minds work, what Cognitive biases are and went into detail on confirmation and anchoring biases. Here’s a quick summary:

How our minds work:
We have 2 systems that influence us, System 1 which is spontaneous, instinctive, and emotional whereas System 2 is more rational, tedious, and effortful.

What are Cognitive biases:
Cognitive bias is a systematic way in which context affects judgment and decision-making.

Anchoring Bias:
The anchoring bias occurs when you rely too heavily on an initial piece of information offered when making decisions.

Confirmation Bias:
Confirmation bias is a tendency to pay attention to information that confirms preconceived notions.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman mentions more biases than just the two mentioned above. Part 2 will be focused on:
1. Availability Bias
2. Sunk Cost Fallacy
3. Peak-End Rule

1. Availability Bias

An availability bias is when a person relies on information that immediately comes to mind for the purpose of making a decision.

How Availability bias can affect designers?
In terms of design, this happens more frequently than we realise. When conducting usability testings and trying to better understand the pain-points users face throughout our product, we tend to become more reliant on the most recent user feedbacks/ challenges faced and end up prioritising those features over other pressing challenges.

Being able to prioritise what the next new feature or part of the product you want to next improve on is very important. Although letting the availability heuristic run your decision may lead to creating a product that is not creating a better user experience for the majority of users. So always take a step back and try to evaluate every possible option before taking the next step to improve your product’s user experience.

HMW as designers use the Availability effect to influence users?
The landing page of your product is the first thing your users come across, this is why it’s so important to have persuasive information readily available.

Not only does this emphasise what all your product has to offer, but your customer’s attention will be drawn to the features/benefits they’d receive when using your product, making it easily available to inform their decision.

2. Sunk cost fallacy

A ‘sunk cost’ is an investment that has already been made. It can be an investment of money, time, or energy. Sunk cost fallacy is the belief that if you’ve already invested in something, it deserves greater investment, even if the investment is unlikely to lead to the desired outcome.

It mainly occurs because we are often influenced by our emotions. We continue to support our past decisions despite new evidence suggesting that it isn’t the best course of action. When we have previously invested in an idea for a feature, we are likely to feel regretful if we do not follow through on that idea because of all the energy and time we’ve put into it.

How can designers overcome the sunk cost fallacy?
As designers it’s impossible you’ve never been in situation where: you spend a ton of your time trying to find the best solution to resolve a problem with the product you are working on. After doing the product research, mapping out flows, making prototypes only to find out at the end when presenting back that the dev team points out all the complexities that would arise with the idea you’re proposing. This can leave you drained and frustrated after all that time and energy you’ve put in. That is why it’s important to constantly get feedback from the product team when working on iterations for a product.

Lean product development is the best process for building products in the fastest way possible with the least amount of resources wasted. All teams in lean organisations work on the product from beginning to end, which allows the product to evolve and upgrade.

By iterating in rapid cycles with faster feedback from the product team, we can recognize bad ideas, functionality problems, complexities and eliminate ideas that simply don’t resonate with the product instead of continuing (due to the sunk cost fallacy) in a path that will only lead your team to a dead end.

3. Peak End Rule

The Peak end rule states that people are more likely to judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of their experience.

HMW create peak beginnings and endings in a products journey?According to Kahneman, “peaks and ends matter but duration does not”. As designers we usually spend more time focusing on trying to reduce the amount of clicks or the amount of time it takes for users to get to their end goal, but we forget to also concentrate on creating those small moments/interactions that liven up their experiences.

Journey mapping is very valuable for visualizing how people interact with your product to accomplish a specific task or goal. This not only helps designers but also other product team members to have a shared understanding of the customer experience and helps in identifying the challenges and opportunities present within the experience to add in these peak moments so that the overall experience is memorable.

Designing for the peak-end rule is about focusing on what brings the most value to the users’ experience.

There you have it, a few more biases that will surely help you design better!
Don’t forget to always questions your unconscious decisions 🤪
Make sure to check out this link for an exhaustive list of heuristics & biases :)