Design better by avoiding your cognitive biases

In this post I will present seven cognitive biases, how they can mess up your design work and what you can do to avoid that.

The Ikea effect - Share your work with other designers and your team member earlier, you will get early feedback from them. So you change your design early, without throwing your whole month effort.

The Dunning-Kruger effect - Plan enough time to research users and the product context. Validate ideas with your users while they’re still sketches; don’t waste time adding details to a concept that’s wrong to begin with.

Not Invented Here - Start design with finding cheap and easy to build ideas. That should force you to look at existing solutions, perhaps even those created by competitors. Don't discard copycats as inferior.

Inattentional blindness - Get users to test your work. They pay attention to different things than you do.

Survivorship bias - Success in the market is all about not failing. ...we can often learn more from failed products than from the successful ones.

Information bias - Take research seriously and use the scientific method. Make your hypotheses explicit, be critical of your testing methods, separate gathering data from analysis.

Confirmation bias - Because confirmation bias is the basis for so many biases, there’s really no way to avoid it completely. ... Avoiding stupidity is better than seeking brilliance. ... Trust your design process and be proud of finding results that go against your intuition.

Can you really outsmart your brain? - Cognitive biases are hardwired and skew our perception of reality. Just knowing about cognitive biases doesn’t make you immune to them. ... The other nasty thing of biases is that they can be easy to spot in other people’s reasoning, but much harder in your own. ... The most effective way to reduce the effect of biases, is to change what you perceive, not how you process it.