Thread by @RohanIrvine

Next up is Michelle Pickrell and @RuthEllison presenting How Not to Let Stakeholder Bias Derail your User Research Findings

#dr2020

Michelle and Ruth start by acknowledging the traditions custodians of the lands where they are zooming in from in Sydney and Canberra.

We tend to identify System 2 as who we are, but most of the time system 1 is in control.

This is why we act on so many of our biases.

So what was happening with the panic buying?

We are all human, all our research is susceptible to bias as researchers as well as stakeholders.

So how do we minimise the effect?

We don't want to give false confidence of our results and misdirect the project

So what are our biases doing?

Confirmation Bias

Tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms your belief.

As researchers we tend to test if hypothesis are true, and less likely to search if it's false.

We look for evidence that makes our hunch true.

So how do you manage it?

Michelle is sharing a story about how delivering negative findings were scrutinised as "But are they actually real outside this group?" But the positive findings lead to agreement about how great they were.

So how do you deal with confirmation bias?

The next two biases are Egocentric bias and Déformation Professionnelle

It's hard to see how other people are right when we only hold our own perspective

When presenting back to stakeholders they would often say 'I would never do that'

So how do you deal with it?

The next 3 biases are
Irrational Escalation
The sunk cost fallacy
The IKEA effect

Working on a large scale project Michelle talks about joining a project while it was in beta and finding that 6/6 participants could not complete the core tasks without help.

They told the PM and they said 'we can only make small changes'

Week after week they found consistent failures and not a single participant could navigate through the journey.

The PM said they were under deadlines and it had cost too much not to deliver (a product no-one could use)

So how do you deal with the sunk cost fallacy?

Next bias is HiPPO

HiPPOs often present their opinions as fact.

On a project Ruth was working on the HiPPO had a lot of opinions about the design, colours, and features they wanted that had zero research.

So how do you deal with it?

The next bias is the curse of knowledge

Make sure your stakeholder know that they are not the users!

Michelle is telling a story where a stakeholder observing a usability test the stakeholder started questioning the intelligence of the participant "The button is right there"

In that situation Michelle explained to the stakeholder that if one person is struggling many will.

The last bias is Hyperbolic discounting.

We are never going to be 100% confident, so we choose the option that helps us move things along in small increments.

It means we're likely to pick the small shiny change over the long valuable change.

How do you make sure you're not stuck in a short term cycle?

So what are the main things to remember?

We are all human.

Biases make use human, we just need to work with them :)

Q: how do you convince experts that their perspectives are not the same as customers? When you can't do both.
A: do your very best to do some research as a base for the conversation
Look for opportunities where other research has been done, is there anything you can reuse?

Q: do you have any suggestions on how to get more HiPPOs onboard and in the room
A: a lot of our work is dealing with executives, try and understand the political landscape, what drives them what makes them tick and which strategic goal are they working toward

A: do it in chunks, not all at once
It takes time, celebrate the little wins.

Thank you so much Michelle and @ruth!!!!

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