Cognitive Biases Determine Success of Design
Systematic bias in perception, memory, interpretation and reasoning is a key aspect of cognition. These biases are used to explain seemingly irrational behavior (e.g. buying a lottery ticket), improve decision making (e.g. training against the “beautiful works well” bias in hiring), the design of financial products (I will save more tomorrow) engineering safety procedures, crafting magic tricks, developing advertising messages and a host of other applications.
Designing to enhance and support cognition (or cognitive design) means understanding and managing (i.e. overcoming or paternalistically leveraging) the cognitive biases at work in your design. To get an idea of the cognitive biases that may be impacting the effectiveness of your design check out the great list on Wikipedia.
September 16th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
What a blog post!! Very informative and also easy to understand. Looking for more such posts!! Do you have a twitter or a facebook?
I recommended it on digg. The only thing that it’s missing is a bit of speed, the pictures are appearing slowly. Anyway thank you for this blog.