Cognitive Bias
We can be manipulated by our flash calculations
Yesterday, We (I and my wife) got rush hours, while we went to Kansai International Airport (KIX). We only had about 17 minutes from Narita Express Train Station to Terminal 3 where my plane take-off. Distance between those two points is about 600m. After walked around 100m, we found 2 signs: one is a way by bus, and another one is 500m walk (via access corridor).
A women with her high heel shoes, jogged to catch-up the bus that already was waiting passengers. We picked another way, walked across corridor. We didn’t realize if the sign told us 500m, not 50m, like what it existed in my mind. We didn’t expect too, if this is corridor of an international airport with long aisle, escalator, duty free area, and of course, check points. With us were our heavy luggages for stay 8 days in Japan. She was right to pick by bus, she only need about 5 minutes and we arrived to Terminal 3 about 15 minutes including check-in by airport security officers, fortunately ground staff from the airlines helped us by cut the passengers queue and did fast airlines check-in process. We almost missed our flight.
“A cognitive bias refers to the systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.”
— Haselton, M. G.; Nettle, D. & Andrews, P. W.
Frequently, we are deceived by our assumptions that are triggered by other people or (critical) situations. My experience in Indonesia, shuttle bus take time to wait passengers (we forgot if we were in Japan, a very discipline country), and my brain told me: we don’t have that time in condition above. By walked across corridor, my brain told me, control was on us, not shuttle bus driver, but we didn’t consider if the velocity of bus is far above humans by walking or jogging normally.
The sign doesn’t tell us how long it takes. So we don’t have time-consume comparison. After we picked walk across corridor, the remain distances were informed to us, but they were not help us at all. They only made us more panic.
The same thing, if we build a product or a service, we must anticipate critical/panic conditions. They need our help with helpful information, not vice versa, and if possible offering “shortcut”, like what ground staff from the airlines did for us.
The shortcut doesn’t avoid the “must-do” procedures, it only pass “nice-do” procedures while normal situations. Like offering transaction history in our apps, so in case our customers forgot to download their ticket, they just show the transaction history while check-in.
Another case, we provide very simple booking process for our Last Minute Hotels (LMH), special hotel booking deals for today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow:
With the fastest payment method, credit card:
Conclusion
A cognitive bias can make your customers confuse and then this situation triggers a panic. Your proper informations and necessary shortcuts (on your product/service feature) are needed. Get your customers out of trouble by their own efforts. This is part of your empathy (the first stage of Design Thinking process) with customers’ problems. You can arrange customers’ problems in empathy and user journey mapping.
