Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners

What Are Decision Frames?

Psychology and behavioral-economics principles often help designers create interfaces that steer users in a desired direction. For example, prospect theory and loss aversion teach us that allowing users to try a service before signing up for it will increase the number of registrations.

For example, consider Resume-now.com, a resume creation application that lets visitors immediately select a template and start customizing their resume without creating an account. Once users have invested their time crafting their resume, they gain a sense of ownership. So, at the end of the process, when Resume-now prompts them to create an account in order to download their resume and store it for future updates, they will be motivated to create an account to avoid ‘losing’ their work.

The same psychological principles that drive users’ decision making also influence how designers make choices — after all, designers are people, too.

Most UX design choices don’t have a single ‘right’ answer. Instead, resolving design trade-offs is heavily dependent on the context. Consequently, UX design decisions are especially vulnerable to bias from framing.

A frame is the context used to describe an idea, question, or decision. Frames heavily influence our interpretations and conclusions by emphasizing (or ignoring) certain aspects of a situation.

The effects of framing are well-known in human psychology. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explored the effect of decision frames and found that the exact same information can lead to opposite conclusions, depending on the frame used to present the decision. For example, a price that is described as ‘discounted’ will attract more buyers than the same price without the ‘discounted’ label.

Framing affects all aspects of UX work, from interpreting research findings to selecting design alternatives.

How Framing Affects Design Choices

Imagine you are working on a website design and have just completed a usability test with 20 users. One task involved using the website’s search function, so you now have a numerical measurement of how many users were able to find and use the search function.

The task results could be stated in 2 different ways using negative and positive framing.

Logically, both of these statements describe exactly the same result, which is an objective data point. But if you’re like most people, the conclusions you come to might be very different depending on which phrasing is used.

We tested this very circumstance in an online quiz. Just over 1,000 UX practitioners participated in the quiz. Participants were randomly assigned to see one of the two hypothetical study results: half saw the version with negative framing, and half saw the version with positive framing.

All were asked the same follow-up question:

 “Should the search function be redesigned?”

The exact phrasing used to describe the finding — whether it is stated as a success rate or a failure rate — should not matter. But it does, as shown in the charts below.

Practitioners who saw the finding described as the failure rate(negative framing) were 31% more likely to believe the design needed to be redesigned than those who saw the same result expressed as a success rate(positive framing).

Only 39% of users who saw the results framed positively as a success rate supported a redesign. However, among the users who saw the results framed negatively as a failure rate, 51% supported a redesign. These numbers show that negative framing increased the number of practitioners who supported a redesign by 30.7% when compared to the group who saw the results framed positively. In case you’re wondering, this difference is statistically significant at p <0.0001.)

In the real world, there's no single 'right' answer to this question. It’s a judgment call, and a variety of factors, such as the type of website, the overall importance of the search function, and any implementation costs, could influence the best answer. Since none of this information was provided in our quiz, ‘I’m not sure’ was technically the best choice, and it’s unsettling that only a minority of practitioners admitted they didn’t know the answer.

It’s also incorrect to infer that the success rate for finding the search function in the interface is 16/20= 80%. Our results were not reported as a percentage because the sample size(20) was not large enough to do so. To interpret a success rate as a percentage that might apply to the entire target audience, it must be based on a larger sample and tested for statistical significance. With only 20 participants, the true success rate may be anywhere between 58% and 93% with 95% confidence, as we explain in our class on measuring user experience.

The phrasing of research findings is an obvious example of the potential for framing effects. However, this bias also impacts design choices in subtler ways. For example:

• Incomplete decision frames, which consider only existing users and not potential future users, may overlook critical opportunities to expand an audience.
• Overly specific frames, which ask questions like ‘Should we implement a responsive version of our site to better support some tasks?’, may overlook other important considerations, such as the potential search ranking benefit of mobile-optimized design.

How to Counteract Framing Bias

Framing is a necessary part of decision making. Completely eliminating frames would be impossible, and not at all helpful, since without the context, you couldn’t compare options.

The trick is to become aware of your decision frame so that you aren’t unconsciously overlooking important information. The following three strategies can help minimize the impact of framing bias.

1. Resist the Impulse to Make a Snap Judgment

Acting quickly is satisfying, but taking the time to explicitly think through the context yields more accurate and meaningful decision frames. In our example, consider the amount of time spent planning and running the usability study. With 20 users, this likely took more than 40 hours to complete. Spending just a little more time thinking about how to present the findings will vastly increase the ROI of the total investment.

2. Gather More Context Before Making a Decision

Like the practitioners who admitted they weren’t sure of the answer — acknowledge (at least to yourself!) when you don’t have enough data to make an informed choice. Then, consider how you could learn more about the situation and what additional data may need to be reported to make an informed decision.

3. Experiment with Different Frames

Try restating your question in reverse terms or from a different point of view. Take a few seconds to flip a data point from a success rate to a failure rate, or consider not just the percentage of failure but the actual number of people affected. These are quick ways to check whether your opinion is being unduly influenced by framing.

Learn more about framing, cognitive biases, and design decision-making in our full-day course: UX Design Trade-Offs: Decision Frameworks.

Reference:

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1685855