Jen Blatz Hello, thank you for joining my webinar today. We have a lot to talk about. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. Let's talk about a few images. What do you see in this image? How about this image? What do you see here? And then finally, what do you see in this image? My guess is that you may have seen a couple of things in these images, right? What's going on here? Jen Blatz Our mind tries to make us feel comfortable in the world around us as quickly as possible. Simply put, our mind plays tricks on us. And sometimes when our brain jumps to conclusions so quickly, like this, it just makes stuff up that is wrong. When we see a couple of things in one image, like here, when you see maybe an upside down bath tub, but you might also see an animal like figure with four legs in the air. This is called the Pareidolia effect. Jen Blatz Now the Pareidolia effect is when people see patterns, inanimate objects, or subliminal messages in something else. Say for example, when you see a shape of a dog's head when you look up in the clouds, that's Pareidolia effect. Pareidolia is an example of a cognitive bias. And that's what we're here to talk about today. Jen Blatz So before we begin, let me tell you very briefly who I am. My name is Jen Blatz, and I'm a lead UX researcher, and designer at Fidelity Investments. I also also co founded a couple of UX groups locally in the Dallas, Texas area, including IXDA and UX Research and Strategy. Though UX Research and Strategy is local, we do have several online events. So feel free to check out the website or check us out on LinkedIn to get some more information. Okay, enough about me. Let's get back to the talk. Jen Blatz First, let me say that I do not come from psychology background. And I think this is important to emphasize. I want to tell you this because I don't want you to worry that this is going to be some stuffy or highly academic talk. Oh, no. I also want you to understand that people outside of psychology, like information architects, UX designers, product owners, developers, and so on, can benefit by knowing just a little bit about cognitive biases. Why? Because we all have them. What I hope to help you with today is to show you some of the ways to identify cognitive bias in yourself and in others. That really is the first step. Being aware of cognitive biases can helpyou keep them from creeping into your work. Jen Blatz So today I'm going to talk about a few things. First, I'm going to give a high level definition of what cognitive bias means. Then I'm going to talk about what to look for in yourself and in others to recognize what a cognitive bia slooks like. Jen Blatz Then I'm going to talk about what you can do to fight them off. And then finally, I'm going to talk about some ways that you can use cognitive biases for good into your advantage. Jen Blatz So let's start with the basics. What is cognitive bias? Well, according to Wikipedia, a cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm, or rationality and judgment. Jen Blatz What? Jen Blatz Like I said before, it's a way our brain plays tricks on us, by jumping to conclusions about the world around us. It's mental shortcuts. We can't help it. The brain just does this without us knowing. Jen Blatz Alright, so now we know what it is. But why should we care? We're not psychologists, right? Well, I'm guessing most of us are not psychologists, nor may have been in a past life. And I'm guessing that most of us in the room here today are related to product or technology, or design world in some way. Jen Blatz As a user experience professional ,whether that be a designer or researcher, we all know it's important to test our designs with users. In doing so you must be very careful not to bias our tests or to lead the witness. Jen Blatz And when I say lead the witness, I mean, asking questions in a biased way that might cause the participant to answer based more on the way that you asked the question rather than their genuine answer. Jen Blatz Being aware of how you might do that, however unintentionally, is a key to a successful usability test, research study, or even when you're working with your team members to solve a problem. If we can recognize a cognitive bias could be a problem and we're aware of the signs, then we can fight the urge to fall down that dark hole. And we can help others from doing the same. Jen Blatz So now let's get started by talking about some types of biases that might creep into your professional world. Well, we might as well start with the most important person in the room. And that's you. Yes, you. We always think we're immune to the problems and flaws of others don't we? Blind Spot bias happens when we see ourselves as less biased than others. Also we're displaying blind spot bias when we eagerly pointed out cognitive biases in others, rather than ourselves. Jen Blatz The key thing to know here is that everyone is affected by blind spot bias. Sure, people are motivated to view themselves in a positive light. It's natural, but we are no better than everyone else. So what does blind spot bias look like? One sign is that you don't accept advice from others. I've seen this so many times. Someone's ego gets in the way of admitting you might not know something. Jen Blatz Okay, so what can you do to prevent blind blind spot bias? First, be aware it happens to everyone. Don't think that you are above the law. In the UX world, if you are conducting some sort of research, let's say a usability test. Make sure you write your discussion guide out and have others review it. A discussion guide or sometimes known as a moderator guide, or a script is your plan for research. It includes things like tasks, research goals and the questions that you're going to ask the participant, that sort of thing. So share your discussion guide with another pro in your team, and make sure that you take their advice on improvements or removing leading questions. If you find yourself resisting help, you might need to take another look at yourself, Mr. blind spot bias. Jen Blatz Okay, let's talk about another cognitive bias which is known as the experimenter bias. First, let me clarify something when I talk about the experimenter. I am not talking about just official researchers, or someone who is running a scientific experiment. Like what you see going on in this picture. I'm talking about anyone who is doing research with users to build empathy to gain understanding about a product or service or interviewing others for information. So I would consider us all an experimenter. Jen Blatz What happens with experimenter bias is a person conducting a usability test tends to share and believe information that that only agrees with their expectation. They tend to share that more. In other words, they promote and talk about the things that went well in the experiment or the research study, and then maybe forgets to mention some of the disagreeable stuff. Jen Blatz So let me tell you a story. I was participating in some research at a financial company, and we were sitting around tables, where each of us had a role. There was an interviewer, a facilitator and a couple of note takers and we had a participant sitting at the head of the table. The participant was telling us about the last time she went to the car dealership to buy a car. Now for many going to a car dealership is not a good experience. And so when she started talking about her car buying experience, it was less than fabulous. And one of the note takers on the team didn't like what she was hearing from the participant. Jen Blatz Instead of silently taking notes, like she should have been doing, she interrupted the participant and said, What? I've never heard of anything like that happening at a dealership before. Are you sure that's what really happened? Jen Blatz Yeah. That behavior is wrong on so many levels. Jen Blatz So how can we avoid experimenter bias? One way to avoid such bias is to use people as observers who have little or no stake and emotional involvement in the outcome of the experiment. If they're not emotionally involved, then they won't care if you kill their darlings. But if a person on your team does have some involvement, make sure you have clear rules and procedures in place for the research process. Remind your team that we are here to gather data and insights and not to share our own thoughts. Jen Blatz So let's go one level deeper than the experimenter bias and talk about the observer expectancy effect. Think about how that person in that previous story when she said, Are you sure that's what really happened? Think about how that comment affected the participant through the rest of the interview, and I can assure you that it did. So let's talk about this next cognitive bias. The Observer expectancy effect is happens when a researcher subconsciously or unintentionally reacts to a participants actions or what they say. And when this happens, a researcher's actions then influences the participants that study. Jen Blatz So what does this look like? Well, it can be surprised facial expressions like when a participant gives a strange or a wrong answer. Or it can be making verbal noises like or, you know, kind of scoffs or sighs when a participant does a wrong move. Let me just say this is bad, bad, bad, bad. Jen Blatz Please, if you're ever talking to users or stakeholders, or partners on your team, and you're seeking their honest feedback, please think about how the observer expectancy cognitive bias can affect that conversation. Jen Blatz So let me tell you another story. It was my first week on the job at a company that owns a bunch of animal hospitals. I was asked to sit on a focus group. Yeah, focus group, a focus group, kind of video call, video meeting call to see the reveal of a new design. The product owner, we'll call him Dennis, because that's his name, addressed the crowd of over 50 that's five oh people on the call including, like veterinarian doctors and technicians. So Dennis said to his innocent bystander. Here's the design for the new prescription search screen. Isn't it great? What do you think? Ugh. Oh, kind of all went black for me after that. Jen Blatz Isn't it great? What do you think? Dennis just stuck in a huge pile of observer expectancy bias. Needless to say, that was the last time that format of a focus group call and someone saying, Isn't this great? That never happened again, on my watch. Jen Blatz As a UX designer, you want your design to succeed. I get it. You poured your heart and soul into your design, you've pushed every pixel into that perfect position. But when your design goes in front of a user, and you see them struggle what to do what you think is the simplest thing on the planet. What are you supposed to do? You want to freak out? Right? Jen Blatz Well, you can't. But here's what you can do to avoid tainting the witness. Like I said before, if you can get someone else to test your designs, again that person is not emotionally invested. And therefore they are much less likely to react to feedback that is not in line with what the designer wants or expects. The major point that you can take away from the observer expectancy bias is to keep your body language and tone in check. You can even record yourself to see your subconscious clues. This will help you be more aware of your reactions and how you can keep them tame. Jen Blatz Okay, so I've talked a lot about how we can detect cognitive bias in ourselves. Now let's expand upon that idea a bit and talk about how cognitive bias can affect how we perceive others compared to ourselves. Jen Blatz Social comparison bias is the tendency to favor people who don't compete with our own strengths. You've heard the phrase, opposites attract, right? Well, I think there's certainly some truth to that. I for one cannot imagine being with somebody as chatty and obnoxious as myself. Humans are constantly evaluating themselves against others in a variety of ways. Jen Blatz Things like we compare ourselves and things like attractiveness, wealth, intelligence, success. We can't help it. Do you know something that I do? Almost subconsciously when I come into a room of strangers I look at a person's face, and then their hand their left hand to see if they have a wedding band on. I do this for both men and women. And I have no idea why. It's not like I'm on the prowl. I just almost instinctively look for look at a person's face, and then their hand. Jen Blatz This is my way of sizing people up. And when it comes to the UX world, even professionals size each other up so that they can try not to look bad. People worry that someone is going to bump their designs or their ideas off that proverbial pedestal. Jen Blatz This is why stakeholders tell you they know what the user wants, or that salespeople won't let you have access to real customers so that you can chat with them yourself. This is why CEOs and product owners don't want to test designs early and iterate on them. They say things like, oh, we'll just get the feedback when it's released to the masses. So what can you do to prevent social comparison bias? Well, when people get hired for our team, we need to think about the diversity of those people. Jen Blatz Look for people from different races, religions, cultures, backgrounds, locations, to bring in that diverse perspective into our product. Just think about what's happening in Silicon Valley and how that they're not providing a diverse perspective because they all kind of live in that tech bubble. By creating a diverse team, we're simply going to build better products. Jen Blatz Okay, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about things that don't agree with our mental models or our ideas. I have another fancy word. You ready? It's the Semmelweis effect. And the Semmelweis effect is the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts the paradigm. The term originated from the story of Ignace Semmelweis, a doctor who discovered that, wait for this, he discovered that mortality or death rates fell 10 times when doctors wash their hands in between patients, and most particularly after performing an autopsy and then going on to a live patient. It's pretty shocking, huh? Jen Blatz Especially in the state where we are now where we're all trying to wash our hands to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Sure, washing your hands in between sick or even dead patients seems like a no brainer now. But Semmelweis's hand washing suggestion was rejected by his peers. Guess that every new process has to start sometime. Jen Blatz So how does this cognitive bias the Semmelweis effect relate to the non medical world? Well, as we've seen in previous examples, people already think they know best. It's hard to convince them that they're wrong. Old paradigms can be stubborn and difficult to break. Jen Blatz For some in the room, this might have been the only way that you could check your email, get on the internet, or do work. This is a picture of an old Macintosh computer. Then this guy came along Steve Jobs and decided that we should be able to do that kind of stuff, access the internet and whatnot on our phone. Yes, our phone. But this concept had been tried before and failed. This is a picture of a Palm Pilot, which is an early personal digital assistant. In fact, other items had been created way before the iPhone, but were not successful. Why? Perhaps the world was just not ready. Jen Blatz Let me say, some people in the world were not ready yet. And that's where the Semmelweis effect kicks in. People are creatures of habit, and we don't like change. But in order for things to be modern and new, we have to change the status quo. We have to be accepting of innovation opportunities. So I want you to think about what might be your Semmelweis handwashing moment. Jen Blatz Okay, so have you ever had someone come to you with a project or a problem to solve? And you wondered how the competition is tackling that same problem? It's pretty natural to wonder how other companies are solving the same issues, right? Well, maybe not always. Jen Blatz The Not Invented Here is a cognitive bias where people don't want to accept information or ideas developed outside of their group. It's the classic Ah, we don't need to know what that group is doing, because it's probably not as good as our idea. Jen Blatz This is really frustrating for me. As a researcher and a designer, my first reaction when we're hearing about a new project or problem to solve is to figure out what already exists in the world. Why reinvent the wheel? Jen Blatz When you look at what our competitor is doing, this is known as a competitive benchmarking or competitive analysis. We look at other products to see what they're doing better. And are those other features good? And maybe we could borrow or steal from those? Or what does that other product basically suck at? So we want to make sure we don't borrow the ideas from that product. So think about this, have you ever had a stakeholder tell you that there was no need to go out and check the competition? There was simply no need because we're already doing things that are better than the other team. Well, this person suffering from the Not Invented Here cognitive bias. Jen Blatz So why does this even happen? Well, I think that there's a number of reasons that can contribute to the Not Invented Here bias. But basically, this whole idea really comes from insecurity. When I'm first assigned to a new product or design, I like to start with comparing similar products, again, partially, so I can see what's out there and steal and borrow the good ideas. I encourage you to do the same so that you avoid the Not Invented Here cognitive bias. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Jen Blatz So, it's pretty common knowledge that people are social beings. Even the introverts on this talk, and I know there's some here today, do seek social interaction from time to time. So this next cognitive bias I'm going to talk about is going to focus on some of the things that we do as humans to fit in with the group. Jen Blatz So have you ever bit your tongue and no, I don't mean like when you're eating some food. I mean, when you wanted to say something in a group setting, but you are afraid your opinion would be too different than that of the others in the group. Jen Blatz The courtesy bias is when you do not fully state your own opinion, once an opinion has been stated by someone else in the group. Even if we don't agree with that opinion, you don't say anything. Because we worry that we don't want to offend others, or we don't want to look bad in front of the group. It makes sense that you might not speak your true feelings in front of others. You don't want to be embarrassed by saying the wrong thing. Like it or not, we're social beings, and we want to fit in. And sometimes we do this by keeping our mouth shut until we feel fake safe to speak against the group. Jen Blatz So how do we exhibit courtesy bias? Well we simply wait for someone else to speak first, before we say anything. Think about a time where there's been a meeting or group video chat where someone expresses an opinion or ask a question. And then no one answers. No one speaks after this. There's just this awkward silence. Well, one of the reasons for the pause, maybe that, you know, they don't have an opinion or an answer to express. Jen Blatz But another reason is that people are afraid to be the first to speak. Again, they don't want to seem foolish by saying the wrong thing in front of the group. Jen Blatz So I have a great way to combat courtesy bias in a brainstorming session. And by that I mean where you have a group of people standing around a whiteboard, each with a sharpie marker in one hand and a pad of post it notes in another. This process also helps those introverts who don't feel comfortable speaking out in a group setting. First, when you have a group's brainstorming session, you need to create a comfortable environment for contradictions. Lay down the ground rules. All ideas are welcome. We're not going to shoot anything down at this point, quantity over quality, those kinds of things. And then after you lay down the ground rules, I want you to go through this process. Jen Blatz You have the group, write down their ideas, as many as they can in the time allotted, whatever that might be two to five minutes. You have them write them down in silence. And then once the that session is done, you have everybody put the post it notes on the wall in silence. Jen Blatz And then finally, once the posts are on the wall, then they can start discussing things as a group. By giving the group the opportunity to generate ideas and silence, you're giving all people a chance to write their true thoughts. They're not distracted by what others are saying. The benefit of coming up with ideas in silence is that it levels the playing field. You give people who do not normally feel comfortable talking in a group, the opportunity to get their thoughts out. And they can do this before all the chatty people come in and start wrecking the whole thing. I'm pointing at myself as guilty as one of those chatty people sometimes. I feel like this is an important first step of any idea generating session. Also, it's a great way of avoiding the courtesy bias among the group. Right. Jen Blatz Okay, so this next group of cognitive biases I'm going to talk about to keep them from creeping into your design and your research is how our perceptions may have been influenced by things we have seen recently, as opposed to things from a long time ago. The first one I'd like to talk about is the Baader Meinhof effect. The Baader Meinhof effect is also known as the frequency illusion. And it is the cognitive bias that happens when something that has recently come into your attention seems like it's appearing everywhere. Jen Blatz It's like the times when somebody famous is in the news and you're like seeing them in your Instagram feed and Twitter and on the news and on all the online sources you read, on the TV, and you feel like you're seeing them everywhere. Jen Blatz So why does this happen? The brain has to quickly make sense of things. It can't help it. Some of you probably see three circles here. You see a red circle, you see a green circle, and you see a purple blue circle. But these circles are actually made up of individual little leafy looking things. What's happening is our mind makes patterns for us. That's why we're seeing these circles. The brain seeks things it's comfortable with and latches on to those, thus ignoring other things it's not familiar with. So when a pattern or a name rings true to us, our brain latches on to it. As a result, we tend to think we see or hear that item more than we actually do. Jen Blatz So here's an example from the real world. You're interested in buying a new green sweater. So you, you have this idea in your head and now you feel like wow, everybody else. seems to have a green sweater too. Or do they? Jen Blatz So when someone makes the claim that this happens all the time, or all of our users do this, take that claim with a grain of salt. The main point is to recognize that trends might not actually be as frequent as the person is stating. It might just be in their mind. Jen Blatz Have you ever seen a person ride a scary ride or roller coaster and like scream the entire time, like screaming and sheer terror? Like they're being murdered? But then when they get off the ride, they're pumped, they're joy, and they're totally ecstatic and ready to hop right back on that ride again. Has anybody ever seen this? Jen Blatz Well, this is known as the Peak-End Rule. People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at the peak or the end of the experience. So in the case of this ride, the person is probably feeling the relief, the ride is over. And they survived it. And they're already forgotten the sheer two minutes of terror they had just been through. So let me illustrate the Peak-End Rule idea with another story. My husband and I were in a restaurant where the menu is on an on a tablet like iPad, and there are not printed menus. I was watching him order a meal from an iPad tablet in a restaurant for some research I was doing on a product My husband has a gluten free diet and needs to order special items like a gluten free bun, gluten free pizza crust and there's a few other dietary Ingredients he needs to be aware of before ordering. I watched him struggle, go through that menu on the tablet. He's clicking all over the place, hunting, pecking, searching. He griped. He complained. He huffed. It was actually kind of funny to watch him. But eventually he found the gluten free bun for his hamburger. The French fries, they said they were gluten free, and he placed his order. After ordering, he said. Well, that was pretty easy. For him te peak of the experience was finishing the task and being successful and being done. That was positive for him, and therefore the whole experience was positive. Jen Blatz So as we learned about the Peak-End Rule, I want to take an opportunity to talk about one of the one of my favorite types of user research which is ethnographic observation or side by sides. And for those who are in the talk today who might not be familiar with ethnographic observation, that's when you are with a participant and you're observing what they do. You're, you're often physically sitting with them side by side, following them around, and then asking some questions as they go along with their process. Jen Blatz So maybe you sit with them while they're out there working at their desk, and you see their work setup. You see the cheat sheets and the hacks that they have at the desk. You see how they interact with their computer. You see how they interact with others. Or like in the photos that you see here. I was on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where I was doing some research for a product. I was observing and talking to tourists to learn how they research tourist attractions in the area. The point here is that you're watching them go through the activity and picking up on those clues that you would only see in person. Jen Blatz People are likely to report things differently after the fact than what really happened. They might not tell you about all their struggles. But if you're there, you can see them firsthand. So why is ethnographic research so important? Like the story about my husband ordering gluten free food. You can't take a person by what they say. But you can take a person by what they do. Jen Blatz I know a lot of today's talk has been focused on the negative aspects of cognitive bias. And this is because they're pretty bad. And I want everyone here to be aware of these important fallacies so you can be better designers, information architects, researchers, product partners, developers, but you can use the traits of cognitive biases for good as well. Jen Blatz Note the positive is the key here. No dark patterns for us, okay, folks? Remember how I talked about the Baader Meinhof effect a little bit ago. Again, that's the cognitive bias that happens when something that has recently come to your attention suddenly seems to appear everywhere. Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can use that comfort and familiarity to guide a user through a journey more smoothly. You can repeat elements like branding and logos, especially in an omni channel experience. Omni channel is where a person might interact with your product across multiple touchpoints. They might start their shopping at home or at work on their computer. Then they go into the store. While in the store, they may open the stores app or website to do some additional research while at that store. As a UX designer, you can use familiar clues like colors, fonts, and common design patterns to make the user feel comfortable with where they are in this experience. Jen Blatz So I'm going to make an assumption here that there are some people watching this webinar, who have assembled a piece of furniture from IKEA. And just curious how that makes them feel. Do you feel satisfied, accomplished, frustrated. I know that I feel like a champion when I put something together from IKEA. I actually love assembling furniture from IKEA. I do have to admit though, I've had some furniture that was a little less than perfect like this. Okay, my stuff was not this bad, but you get the idea. Jen Blatz Whether you love it or hate it, there's even a cognitive bias associated with the famous blue and Swedish box store. IKEA. The IKEA effect is the tendency for people to place high value on objects that they partially assemble themselves, just like furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality or the end result. So why is this a thing? People have an emotional investment when they build something from their own blood, sweat and tears. And so how could the IKEA effect be applied to UX design? Well, a user can experience that same effect when they complete a task, like assembling a puzzle or finishing a level in a game. They feel a stronger emotional connection when they complete it successfully. So consider this failing when you're building an interface or some sort of product, that How could you perhaps give the user a taste of delight after their own success? Jen Blatz Hopefully, maybe you found a couple of the things I've talked about today a little bit funny. All right, give me a break. I tried to inject a little bit of humor along the way. I've done that because I know humorous items are more easily remembered than non humorous ones. And this is known as the humor effect. So this is an easy one, right? We've all seen something funny on the internet. I love this 404 or error page. It really cracks me up. What's happening here is you get to choose the developer who gets fired for this error message coming up. It's just a little bit of light fun. Jen Blatz When your companies show something funny, it allows users to connect with your company or product in a more personal and emotional level. Humor feels more conversational, or relatable, and it gives your site or product, a bit more of that human connection. Jen Blatz So how can you inject humor into your site or your products? Well, first you want to decide how you're going to do it. Is it gonna be words, illustrations, animations, you have lots of options. I do have one caveat about humor. Make sure it's appropriate for your audience and it represents the message your company wants to send. Do not be inappropriate. Remember, we're using these cognitive biases for good, right. Jen Blatz Let's move on to another example of cognitive bias that could be used to benefit your designs. I'm just gonna let this image sit here for a second so that you can kind of take it in. There's a lot going on here. This is really crazy. I can't even look at this image very long. In a world where everyone seems to be trying to one up the next product or company, people have to get more creative and maybe extreme to capture your limited attention. What that means is bizarre material is better remembered than common material, thus, the bizarreness effect kicks in. Jen Blatz This is part of the reason why humans and animals have peripheral vision. We notice things that move and in many cases, we notice things that are different. So this seems like a pretty easy cognitive bias that we could use for good and design right? Just make everything shocking. Hmm, no, I would say not really. The whole point here is that you want your website or your product or whatever to stand out in a sea of sameness. I get that. But you also don't want to be obnoxious and annoying. You can use design elements like color contrast, emphasis to make something stand out. This is why you often see buttons, a different color than the other items on a page. You can also use animations to draw attention to something. And finally, like I mentioned before, you can use humor, like a fun illustration to play into this bizarreness effect. The key is to balance being pleasantly surprised with obnoxious as heck. Jen Blatz And then finally, I'm going to wrap up the ways that you can use cognitive biases for good with a very important one that we often take for granted. And if you do nothing else in the universe, as a designer or person met helping to build products. Jen Blatz Please do this one thing. Make good defaults, like this nice and tidy room here. When a person comes to your product for the first time, have things set up nice and neat for them. The default effect happens when we're given a set of options, we assume the default options are the best ones. We expect good things already to be chosen for us. And we don't have to do anything to set them. Say for example, when you install an app on your phone, you might assume that push notifications are turned off automatically. If not, you find out the hard way. They're actually turned on by default, as soon as you're bombarded by a bunch of useless messages. Oh, I've been there. It's very frustrating. Jen Blatz You assume the expert or at least the creator of the app has vetted out the best design decisions for you, don't you? And that's what's automatically set in motion for when you sign up. When given a choice between several options, we have the tendency to favor the default one. Humans are lazy. Tell us what the best selection is, Like the famous words of Steve Krueg, don't make me think. Jen Blatz So how do you design a product or experience to promote good defaults? Well, part of it is to keep the marketing and the sales department out of the quote designing a feature business. Let's be honest, they often want to plug things into an app for a different agenda than what the user wants. Don't let them throw in a bunch of features in there that our users don't really need. Sometimes they just contribute to feature bloat. Jen Blatz Okay, really though, a practical way you can design good defaults is to conduct user research to understand how the person normally uses your product, and align the defaults to that. So how is this done in design. Use color, font, and group like items together and emphasize the best option. Package items in a visual way that will give the user confidence that you're presenting the right choice to them. That is, of course, if you actually are presenting the right choice to them, and the best option. Remember, we're going to do good with our designs. To conclude, I want to revisit a few of the major points we talked about today. Jen Blatz We talked about how biases affect everyone, like the blind spot bias, and how we need to be careful when we're acting as a researcher, not to lead the witness. We talked about the need to avoid things like the Semmelweis effect, and to be open to different and outside ideas. We also discussed our human need to fit in with the group with the cognitive bias like the courtesy bias. We talked about how our memory can be skewed. And we think something we've seen recently, like in the Baader Meinhof effect makes us think we're seeing something all the time. And then finally, we talked about some ways to turn that frown upside down and use cognitive biases for good in our designs. Jen Blatz Now, these are just the things we talked about today are just the tip of the iceberg of how many cognitive biases are out there. But I think we hit on some of the major ones that you can take away with you today and hopefully apply to your work and your conversations. The main point is to be aware that they exist. Look for the signs of them and yourself. And more fun? Look for the signs of cognitive biases and others. Jen Blatz And hopefully you'll keep them out of your future designs and discussions. What I want you to do is to go out there and build better products without bias. Thank you very much. Jen Blatz Please feel free to connect with me, Jen, Jennifer Blatz, on Twitter, LinkedIn, all the usual places. Thank you again for your time. Have a great day. Transcribed by https://otter.ai