The purpose of UX: You don’t know what you don’t know.

Note: This article was first published here, on Medium. You can follow me on Dribbble and Medium to get the latest designs and design articles that I post.

Often, I have been given existing interfaces, requirements, or designs and have been asked to make them look pretty. And more than often, I have changed them from ground up to show that they could be done better. Or sometimes, I show them that it was being done incorrectly all along. But why?

"We are developers, designers, marketers, managers, or any other title one may hold — we’re all stakeholders in our product. We have been into this for so long that we do not know what it feels like to not know them. This cognitive bias is what makes our users the most important stakeholders.

The Curse of Knowledge

A few years ago, I read this amazing piece called “The Curse of Knowledge” in Made to Stick, a book written by Chip and Dan Heath. They use this phrase to highlight the communication gap between people — like a CEO with 30 years of experience trying to communicate the company’s goals with their staff. Chip and Dan describe a psychology experiment that highlights this gap. Here’s the abridged version of it:

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game with a bunch of participants. She had them divided into two groups: one were the ‘tappers’, the other were the ‘listeners’. The tappers were given 25 easy and popular songs like Happy Birthday and Jingle Bells. The objective of this game was that the tappers would tap the songs on a table, and the listeners would guess what song it was. Sounds easy, right?

During the experiment, 120 songs were tapped in total and the number of songs correctly identified by the listeners was noted. In the end, the tappers were asked to guess the number of times their songs were identified by the listeners. The tappers’ guess was 50%, but in reality, only 3 songs were correctly identified, which is a mere 2.5%. The reason? While tapping the song, the tappers were syncing the taps to the song playing in their mind.

The tappers simply couldn’t understand why the listeners couldn’t guess such simple songs.

So how does this relate to UX?

The above experiment raises a very crucial issue that is omnipresent: When something is obvious to us, it is extremely hard to know or remember what it was like without this knowledge. There is simply no way to unlearn what we know. If we extend the Curse of Knowledge to crafting user experiences, it teaches us an important lesson:

What we know vs. what we think our users know vs. what they really know are never the same.

When we do not design our products for our users, it leads to stupid, poorly designed products. These poorly designed products can frustrate, anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them. Some of the most recent popular UX mistakes being the design of the Miss World 2015 cue card and the design of Hawaii’s missile alert system. These mistakes were not intentional at all, because the product was not designed by oneself for their own use, and the person who designed it did not evaluate how it would be used. In other words, the designer did not anticipate that the product might be used in a different and incorrect way due to a phenomenon known as cognitive bias.

A Cognitive bias is an inherent thinking error that humans make while processing information. These thinking errors prevent one from accurately understanding reality, even when confronted with all the needed data and evidence to form an accurate view.

Cognitive biases are our curse, and the origin for all the poorly designed products and services in the world.

Breaking the curse

We often find ourselves amidst poor UX every day. Understanding the users is the core of UX, and all UX practices are built for the pursuit of breaking this curse of knowledge. In simple words, here’s what it takes:

1. In the realms of design, speech or writing, it is necessary to continuously refine the design or content to make sure that the audience understand both the message right and the right message.
2. Using common words and jargons, along with the right analogies and metaphors (the right iconography, gestures etc. in the design world) to illustrate the point one is making is very essential.
3. Breaking down bigger concepts into smaller ones for efficient communication is vital to make sure that users get just what they want. For this to work, one should also have the knowledge of the target audience, and their understanding of the product/domain.
4. Similarly, journeying the users from small concepts to larger ones is just as important. The onus is on the designers to slowly transform amateur users into pros.
5. Finally, getting constant feedback from the users and using that feedback to revisit the designs and design decisions aid in all the above points.

An experiment that sought to break the curse

UX designers are paid for one reason — to think from and understand the users’ perspective. So what makes it hard to think from multiple perspectives? Welcome to the world of Functional Fixedness.

Functional Fixedness is a kind of a cognitive bias. It is the inability to use an object for something other than how it is usually used.

A famous cognitive performance test known as the candle problem, or candle task, or the Duncker’s candle problem demonstrates this bias. In this problem, the participant is given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches. The task is to fix the candle to the wall and lighting it, in such a way that the wax does not drip to the ground or the table underneath.

A few creative solutions that the participants came up were fixing the candle using the tack directly on to the wall and using the wax itself as an adhesive to fix the candle to the wall. The correct solution in this case was to fix the box of tacks to the wall and placing the candle on box.

There have been many variations of this problem that have attempted to increase the number of correct solution among the participants. Among a few variants, when the participants were presented the tacks piled next to the box, and not inside it, almost all of the participants seemed to reach the optimum solution. In another instance, when people were told that they are presented with “a box and tacks” instead of “a box of tacks”, it increased the rate of correct solutions. In another variant, where the participants were provided with a written version of the problem, underlining the keywords (like candle, box, tacks, etc.) doubled the number of solvers. It shows how people tend to think about the box and tacks as two different concepts or entities and how this perspective affects the outcomes.

This experiment shows how we can steer our audience to understand and make them do what we intended. A little thinking from the users’ perspective goes a long way in UX.

Countering the Curse of Knowledge is a continuous process. It involves more than just empathizing with the user, since social psychology studies show that we’re not very good at figuring out what other people are thinking, even when we try really hard.

You’d often be surprised to find that what’s obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else. — Steven Pinker, a Canadian-American Cognitive Psychologist.