Design for Cognitive Bias

Our users’ minds take all sorts of shortcuts to get through the day. Usually they’re harmless, but not always. In this talk from UX New Zealand 2020, David Dylan Thomas, author of the book Design for Cognitive Bias, shows how designers can use these mental shortcuts for good instead of evil.

Using real-world examples, Thomas identifies some of the nastier biases that lead users to make bad decisions, then looks at the content strategy and design choices that can redirect or eliminate them. He finishes by turning to designers themselves: the biases we bring to our own work, and methods for keeping our blind spots from hurting the people we design for.

Many of the biases he covers, such as anchoring, framing and the power of defaults, appear as persuasive patterns in the UI-Patterns.com library.