Cognitive Biases and Principles in UX Flashcard Deck
What is Hick’s Law?
HICK’S LAW DEFINITION
Hick’s Law predicts that the time and the effort it takes to make a decision, increases with the number of options. The more choices, the more time users take to make their decisions.
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What is Confirmation Bias?
People tend to search for, interpret, prefer, and recall information in a way that reinforces their personal beliefs or hypotheses.
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What is Priming?
Subtle visual or verbal suggestions help users recall specific information, influencing how they respond. Priming works by activating an association or representation in users short-term memory just before another stimulus or task is introduced.
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What is Cognitive Load?
Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort that is required to complete a task. You can think of it as the processing power needed by the user to interact with a product. If the information that needs to be processed exceeds the user’s ability to handle it, the cognitive load is too high
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What is Anchoring Bias?
The initial information that users get affects subsequent judgments. Anchoring often works even when the nature of the anchor doesn’t have any relation with the decision at hand. It’s useful to increase perceived value.
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What is a Nudge?
People tend to make decisions unconsciously. Small cues or context changes can encourage users to make a certain decision without forcing them. This is typically done through priming, default option, salience and perceived variety.
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What is Progressive Disclosure?
An interface is easier to use when complex features are gradually revealed later. During the onboarding, show only the core features of your product, and as users get familiar, unveil new options. It keeps the interface simple for new users and progressively brings power to advanced users.
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What is Fitt’s Law?
Fitts’s law is a predictive model which states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. This is mainly used to model the act of pointing, either physically (e.g., with a hand) or virtually (e.g., with a computer mouse).
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What is Banner Blindness?
Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads.
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What is the Decoy Effect?
When we are choosing between two alternatives, the addition of a third, less attractive option (the decoy) can influence our perception of the original two choices. Decoys are “asymmetrically dominated”: they are completely inferior to one option (the target) but only partially inferior to the other (the competitor). For this reason, the decoy effect is sometimes called the “asymmetric dominance effect.”
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What is Framing?
The framing effect happens when your decision is influenced more by how the information is presented (or worded) than by the information itself. It’s partly due to the fact that people evaluate their losses and acquire insight in an asymmetric fashion (see Loss Aversion and Prospect Theory, by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky).
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SKIP What is Attentional Bias?
SKIP What is the Empathy Gap?
SKIP What are Visual Anchors?
SKIP What is the Van Restorff Effect?
SKIP What is a Visual Hierarchy?
SKIP What is Selective Attention?
SKIP What is Survivorship Bias?
SKIP What is a Juxtaposition?
SKIP What are Signifiers?
SKIP What is Contrast?
SKIP What is an External Trigger?
SKIP What is a Center-Stage Effect?
SKIP What is the Law of Proximity?
SKIP What is Tesler’s Law?
SKIP What is the Spark Effect?
SKIP What is a Feedback Loop?
SKIP What is the Expectations Bias?
SKIP What is the Aesthetics-Usability Effect?
What is Social Proof?
Social proof is a convenient shortcut that users take to determine how to behave. When they are unsure or when the situation is ambiguous, they are most likely to look and accept the actions of others as correct. The greater the number of people, the more appropriate the action seems.
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What is Scarcity?
While scarcity is typically invoked to encourage purchasing behaviors, it can also be used to increase quality by encouraging people to be more judicious with the actions they take. It can come in different forms: Time-limited, Quantity limited, Access-limited. Never fake scarcity if you don’t want reactance!
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What is the Curiosity Gap?
The curiosity gap is the space between what users know and what they want or need to know. Gaps cause pain, and to take it away, users need to fill the knowledge gap.
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What is a Mental Model?
A mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, which might be accurate or not. What users believe they know about your product changes how they use it.
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What is a Familiarity Bias?
Users have an innate desire for things they’re already familiar with. And the more we experience something, the more likely we are to like it. So, try to use common patterns when creating new experiences.
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What is Skeuomorphism?
Skeuomorphism is where an interface object mimics its real world counterpart to facilitate transition to new technology. The digital object imitates reality by how it appears or how the user can interact with it. Skeuomorphism partly relies Familiarity Bias and on a usability concept called “Affordance” (the actions which users consider possible while interacting with an object).
Skeuomorphism is best used to get users to adapt to new interfaces and new technology. Especially since nowadays, most users have become used to interacting with graphical user interfaces. That’s why creating a skeuomorphic interface strictly for aesthetic reasons won’t always work and might even clutter the interface.
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What is Reciprocity?
Reciprocity is a social norm of responding to a positive action with another positive action, rewarding kind actions. In the context of digital product experiences, users are more likely to engage with your product if you first provide them value. They’ll be more likely to trust you and reciprocate. That’s even more important when you’re about to ask for something big from your users (sign up, paywall, etc).
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What is the Singularity Effect?
People are more willing to empathize with a single, identifiable person than large abstract groups. This means that the addition of more people doesn’t increase your willingness to help proportionally. On the opposite, your compassion fades as more people are involved. The Singularity Effect, combined with the Character Identification Effect and the Narrative Bias explains why you tend to remember stories with vivid characters much better than abstract statistics and data (see examples below).
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What is a Variable Reward?
In the operant conditioning method, a variable-ratio schedule is a schedule of reinforcement where a response is reinforced after an unpredictable number of responses. This unexpected schedule creates a steady, high rate of responding.
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What is the “Aha! moment”
The aha moment is a moment of sudden insight or discovery. In software, it’s the pivotal moment when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it.
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What is a Goal Gradient Effect?
The closer users are to reaching a milestone (e.g., completing a task, reaching a goal, etc), the faster they work towards reaching it. Interestingly, even artificial or estimated progress indicators can help to motivate users. That’s why it’s crucial that your experience provides a clear indication of progress to provide this feedback to your users.
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What is Occam’s Razor?
Occam’s razor is a mental model which states that “it is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer”—in other words, the simplest explanation is most likely the right one. Be careful, simple does not mean ignoring important facts in an attempt to reduce the complexity. It requires open mindedness to seek a better solution with less complexity and less assumptions, exploring a better way of doing things.
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What is the Noble Edge Effect?
When companies demonstrate genuine caring and social responsibility, they tend to be rewarded with increased brand loyalty, and greater profits.
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