Focusing Illusion: the judgment distorting bias of designers

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As designers, we need to make sure that our empathy muscle is well trained so that we put ourselves in the customers’ shoes in a snap of fingers. That’s a skill we learn over time, and once we master it, we become better designers and ultimately better persons.

But what are the risks?

To build that kind of empathy we need to immerse ourselves in their lives — it’s almost like we’re forming a mental connection, feeling their confusion, frustration, or delight. Trying to bring real-world feelings into a workspace, and create a flow of empathy that runs through our team’s veins. That’s not easy to do. It needs a lot of focus.

That’s when we’re in danger of contracting the Focusing Illusion.

I first came across this term while reading Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman — this book is not about design, but I’d recommend it to every designer. Let me try and summarise it for you:

The focusing illusion is a judgment distorting bias, that occurs every time we think about an aspect of life (it can be money, friends, our dog or how cold it is outside), and we are asked to evaluate how much that aspect matters to us.

Let’s take chocolate for example — if I ask you: “How much pleasure do you get from chocolate?”; You will instantly know the answer to that, ranging anywhere from “none” to “heaps”.

Are you sure your answer is correct?

No need to think about that too much, you can probably guess by now that your answer is not correct. Don’t worry about it, it happens to all of us.

We are guilty of overestimating. And this is what the author is trying to prove (and does eventually): we cannot accurately evaluate the importance of a particular aspect of our lives, without engaging in a careful examination and comparing to other aspects (e.g., how sunny it is outside).

Speaking of weather, to prove his point, the author ran a study to assess the significance of climate in our overall well being. If you’re anything like me, you’d say that weather influences your mood and even happiness to a certain extent, but then again, this is probably the answer that you would give in a fraction of a second (again, wrong).

To assess the real effect that weather has on our well being the author asked two different groups of people (Californians and Midwesterners) about their attitude towards it. However, instead of asking a single question, he made it part of a set of questions including multiple aspects of life. As expected, Californians love the abundance of sunlight, while Midwesterners despise the cold seasons, but when the results came in, the climate did not make a difference in their overall well being. Why? Because it was just not a significant enough determinant when compared to the rest.

I won’t go into more details about the study because that is not the goal of the article, so long story short, my take away from the chapter is:

We will most likely exaggerate the importance of what it is that we’re focusing on. To avoid doing that, we must go through a structured process that allows us to identify and rank all other aspects of the topic.

So as I was reading about this concept, I had a strange sense of familiarity, without really knowing why, but as I was digesting it, I started noticing some of these facts in my day to day life. Until one day, during a whiteboard sketching activity, it hit me: our entire design team was suffering from the focusing illusion.

Pumped up with excitement after coming up with solutions for a new customer loyalty scheme, we were eager to sketch the new customer journey. But the problem was that all that excitement made us turn a blind eye to the core jobs to be done that the product was meant for.

We were acting as if the loyalty programme was the reason why customers were there in the first place.

Under the influence of the focusing illusion, we were challenging the information architecture of the app, trying to take up precious screen real estate after login (it was a mobile app by the way), and disrupting other journeys. Don’t get me wrong, the ideas were great (amazing if I may say), but the loyalty scheme was not why customers were logging in, and it should not have gotten that much attention, no matter how good it was.

Imagine you’re on a business trip, tired after endless meetings, and you finally reach your hotel to check in late in the evening. The most important thing for you right now is to get into some comfy slippers, take a hot shower, and sleep — that is the main job that the hotel has to do. But hey, the management just launched a revolutionary loyalty programme that they’re all excited about, so they instruct the staff to give each guest a 5 minutes presentation of the benefits during check-in. Five minutes might not be too long for people on vacation, but it’s not what you want on a late evening, no matter how good the benefits are. You will probably not even pay attention to what they say.

Interesting? Let’s study this disorder a bit, and see how it manifests on designers. By the way, if it’s not clear yet, this article is a satire, and Focusing Illusion is not a medical disorder. But just like real disorders, it begins with symptoms, has a source, is transmitted and (thankfully) is treatable.

Symptoms

Here are some of the signs that indicate that your team might be suffering from Focusing Illusion. I am using the word “might” because these symptoms could be caused by other design disorders.

• You’re not exploring a wide enough range of customer problem statements — during research, you are not capturing broad aspects of human nature such as personal motivations, emotional jobs to be done, the context of use. Instead, you are fixated on specific problem statements, linked to one particular solution. Hence the research output is very functional and does not produce the expected “Aha” moments.
• Your test results don’t match post-launch performance— encountered more often with complex products, the prototype used for testing is not capturing the entire journey, omitting parts which are not in the team’s current scope (e.g. paid media ads on social media / search engine, login feature, SMS messages, physical letters, etc). Hence the test results will most likely not be reliable.
• Your product information architecture needs too many updates —If your team is challenging the information architecture on a frequent basis, then it’s very likely that they are working as if the product is supposed to adapt to a new feature instead of the other way around. It’s true that sometimes it’s difficult to tell if it’s a sign of focusing illusion or just the natural evolution of the information architecture. This is the symptom that I experienced earlier in the story.
• You have a significant number of change requests during the build — when it’s time to build it, a considerable amount of change requests or rework delays the project.

Source and Transmission

• Self-infliction — In most cases, we trigger the focusing illusion, fuelled by too much excitement, effort, and passion. It’s our human nature to believe that our work is essential, but sometimes we tend to exaggerate how much it actually matters.
• Our team members — it’s highly transmittable among team members who spend a lot of time working on a project in isolation (silos). Chances of occurrence are higher when enthusiasm and passion are present in the team.
• Management — in some cases management is the source of this condition, and this is because they are passionate and influential characters who will empower and influence the design team to give their best and be focused on what they’re doing.

Treatment

I’m happy to let you know that this Design Disorder is treatable (and no, the solution is not to get distracted). From case to case, use the following techniques:

• Boost your qualitative interview technique and focus on things outside of your feature/service/product (e.g., the context of use, push and pull factors, emotional jobs to be done, etc.).
• Use Experience Mapping or Service Blueprints to make sure you keep an eye on the entire experience instead of only the part you’re designing for.
• Run quantitative Surveys to assess how significant the problem that your feature/service/product is solving is when compared to other problems users might have.
• Arrange stakeholder Interviews to fully understand how your feature/service/product fits in your company, from a strategic perspective.
• Facilitate cross-team workshops to share knowledge and better understand how and where your journey fits in the grand scheme of things.
• Coordinate comprehensive usability tests that test the entire journey, not just the part that you’ve worked on.

Closing thoughts

“A long time ago people believed that planet Earth was the center of the universe and the Sun revolved around it.”

This is how a fellow designer used to start the discussion when explaining the focusing illusion to his team.

That is a compelling analogy, and it helps us stay humble, and find more unassuming ways to fit our work into consumer lives.

The fact is that unless you know for sure that your feature, product or service is essential to the customer, your best bet is to assume that you’re going to get minimum attention and design with that in mind.

That being said, I firmly believe that the ability to focus is a superpower in a day and age of distraction, but beware … it might cause illusions.

Design Disorders is a collection of short satires, meant to study, explain and hopefully set right widespread design slip-ups.