52 UX Cards to Discover Cognitive Biases
A few weeks ago, Laurence Vagner (with a V) and I gave a workshop in Paris Web. The theme was “cognitive biases”. We had already gave this workshop in English for our UX in Lux community in Luxembourg. For the French version of the workshop, we created a 52 UX cards deck to help people discover and understand different cognitive biases. This card deck is now available in English as well.
Cognitive biases are psychological thought mechanisms and tendencies that cause the human brain to draw incorrect conclusions. For better or worse, you can use them in many different ways to influence user behaviour in your products and services. These biases will also impact collaboration between team members and during meetings or might influencer your user research. Whether you are creating the user experience of an interfaces or purchasing something online, it’s interesting to be aware of these biases.
** Si vous souhaitez une version française des cartes elle est disponible ici **
A deck of 52 Cognitive Bias UX Cards
The list of cognitive biases is long and might look downright frightening for many people. To make this easier to digest, Laurence and I selected 52 out of the list and organized them into 5 categories:
- Decision-making & behaviour
- Thinking & problem solving
- Memories & recalling
- Interview & user testing
- Team work, social & meetings
The icons for those categories come from Streamline, in case you where wondering 🙂
These cards were created for teaching and learning purposes. They help team members become aware of their own biases and the different biases they can induce, whether on purpose or not, to users. They can also be used as a cheat sheet and as “reminder cards” while designing. We can use them in small workshops with your coworkers to raise awareness among your team.
If you are interested for a remote workshop with the cards, please contact me!
** I am currently reworking that part, the card PDF will be available again in 2023. Subscribe to the Newsletter if you want to be kept in the loop, I will announce the new content in there**
An online list to help you
We have prepared an online list. You can even add it as shortcut on your phone, yeahy. (I might eventually turn this into a PWA and have it work offline)
Online list of 52 selected biases
This little tool also now exists in Italian. thanks a lot to Salvatore Cordiano for the translations!!!
For more biases, you can visit the full list of biases extracted from Wikipedia. Kudos to Geoffrey for the code of those pages.
Some pictures of the workshop
Here are some pictures of our cards and participants working very hard to sell us a unicorn with as much bias as possible.
The online version of the workshop
Due to the health situation, we also now have a online version of the workshop in an “online” version on miro
The workshop steps are the same. We have 2 phases. A first discovery phase where we ask people to describe and relate to some of the biases. Another phase where we ask them to build the most evil experience possible. On top of that, we add a small icebreak at the beginning of the session. This helps people not used to tools like Miro (or Mural of Figjam) discover those without too much pressure.
We of course finish again with the discussion on ethics.
For more details about the online version of the workshop:
How to Facilitate a Remote Workshop on Cognitive Biases
More cards, inspiration and resources
If you want to go further here a few resources:
- The “wikipedia list of cognitive biases“
- Sketchplanations explained a few cognitive biases with some awesome illustrations
- David Dylan Thomas wrote a whole book on cognitive biases called “Design for Cognitive Bias“
- The scary Cognitive Bias Code from 2016 (which inspired us to build the English workshop in the first place)
- 🧠 The Psychology of Design:101 Cognitive Biases & Principles That Affect Your UX, the list of biases organized in 4 categories with examples
- In our first English workshop, we used Cognitive Bias Cards For Learning Practitioners and mentioned Sitback’s UX Cards and also the github Cognitive Bias Cards. All of them inspired us to create the French version of the cards.
- Pocket Biases is a small Progressive Web app that also lists the biases and helps you digest them in a more easy way
- To have more fun there’s also a little online game with different biases.
- You can also read 84 cognitive biases that will help you design better-converting products
