The Real vs. Imagined World
The world we encounter is often very different from the one we’re expecting.
Our brains have ways of explaining and resolving this (cognitive dissonance), often telling ourselves little fictions to protect our egos:
“Oh… that will never happen to me.” or “That’s just the way (insert individual name) behaved this once. “
I think that this problem weighs heavily on the design world: designs are so often a product of how we imagine or desire people will use our designs, as opposed to how they actually do use them (see previous post).
UX design attempts to be objective about this (through research and testing), but the subjective attitude is so deeply entrenched in all of us that it’s hard to counter. As our industry matures I hope we’ll slowly change our ways.
By asking myself and a team:
how can you assume that? Have you seen this behaviour, or did you imagine it?
– we can start to deconstruct the assumptions that we’re imposing on a design.
Articles like this one from Flow are a good way forward: 4 ways to combat usability testing avoidance
Do you know of any other resources for ‘resetting the brain’? Comments welcome.
