Implementation Intention as a Debiasing Intervention for a Bias Blind Spot Among UX Practitioners

TY - GEN

T1 - Implementation Intention as a Debiasing Intervention for a Bias Blind Spot Among UX Practitioners

AU - Bogdescu, Oana

AU - Biskjaer, Michael Mose

AU - de Rooij, Alwin

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - When designing digital products that millions of people use, User Experience (UX) practitioners are prone to typical cognitive biases that might threaten the quality of their work. A barrier for mitigating such biases is the bias blind spot: People are more likely to detect bias in others than in themselves. Since practitioners have no standard means to diminish the bias blind spot, this paper investigates the prospect of implementation intention, designed as a commitment to consider how one evaluates others when evaluating oneself, as a debiasing intervention. As a preliminary study, an online experiment was conducted among 123 UX practitioners to examine whether implementation intention could yield a short-term bias blind spot diminution. The results suggest that the UX practitioners perceived more cognitive bias in the ‘average UX practitioner’ than in themselves, and that implementation intention served to diminish this bias blind spot short-term for novices and experts alike.

AB - When designing digital products that millions of people use, User Experience (UX) practitioners are prone to typical cognitive biases that might threaten the quality of their work. A barrier for mitigating such biases is the bias blind spot: People are more likely to detect bias in others than in themselves. Since practitioners have no standard means to diminish the bias blind spot, this paper investigates the prospect of implementation intention, designed as a commitment to consider how one evaluates others when evaluating oneself, as a debiasing intervention. As a preliminary study, an online experiment was conducted among 123 UX practitioners to examine whether implementation intention could yield a short-term bias blind spot diminution. The results suggest that the UX practitioners perceived more cognitive bias in the ‘average UX practitioner’ than in themselves, and that implementation intention served to diminish this bias blind spot short-term for novices and experts alike.

KW - Bias blind spot

KW - debiasing

KW - implementation intention

KW - user experience (UX) practitioners

U2 - 10.21606/drs.2022.155

DO - 10.21606/drs.2022.155

M3 - Article in proceedings

T3 - DRS Biennial Conference Series

BT - Proceedings of the 2022 Design Research Society Conference (DRS 2022)

PB - Design Research Society

T2 - Design Research Society 2022

Y2 - 25 June 2022 through 3 July 2022

ER -