Your mind takes shortcuts to get through the day. We call these cognitive biases. Usually they’re harmless. Even helpful. But what happens when they’re not? In this talk we’ll identify some particularly nasty biases and the kinds of design and content steps we can take to keep them in check, or even turn them to a user’s advantage.

1. Design for Cognitive Bias
Using Mental Shortcuts for Good Instead of Evil

2. David Dylan Thomas
Principal, Content Strategy,
Think Company

3. @movie_pundit
daviddylanthomas.com

6. What is cognitive bias?

7. A series of shortcuts our minds
take that often help, but
sometimes hurt.

9. Reactance

12. Confirmation Bias

14. These biases are extremely difficult to combat
● You may not know you have them (bias blind spot)
● 90% of cognition happens below the conscious level
● Even if you do know, you do it anyway!

15. Choice Architecture: Or Why You Need
to Know About Cognitive Bias

16. Think about what decisions your user
needs to make.
Then think about how people make
decisions.

17. There are design choices we can make
that help keep harmful cognitive biases
in check (or leverage them for good).

18. Blind Resumes

19. Whom would you rather hire?

20. Why do you need that information?

21. Content Strategy: Signal vs. Noise
Signal
● Qualifications
● Experience
Noise
● Gender
● Race

23. Cognitive Fluency

24. Easy to read = Easy to do

25. Hard to read = Hard to do

29. Which of these would you rather fill out?

30. Which of the following is true?
There are 55 African nations in the United Nations
There are 53 African nations in the United Nations

31. “When the cat’s away, the mice will
play.”

32. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

33. Whom do you trust?

34. How Amazon fights recency

36. How to fight the bandwagon effect

38. The framing effect

40. What about our own cognitive biases?

41. Confirmation Bias

43. 2, 4, 6, _

44. 2, 4, 6, 8

45. 2, 4, 6, 7

46. Deformation Professionnelle

48. Our jobs are harder than we think

49. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a
‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-
oriented’ society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property
rights are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism, and militarism are incapable
of being conquered.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

50. Thank You!
David Dylan Thomas
@movie_pundit