Implementation intention as a debiasing intervention for a bias blind spot among UX practitioners

When designing digital products that millions of people use, User Experience (UX) practitioners are prone to typical cognitive biases that might threaten the quality of their work. A barrier for mitigating such biases is the bias blind spot: People are more likely to detect bias in others than in themselves. Since practitioners have no standard means to diminish the bias blind spot, this paper investigates the prospect of implementation intention, designed as a commitment to consider how one evaluates others when evaluating oneself, as a debiasing intervention. As a preliminary study, an online experiment was conducted among 123 UX practitioners to examine whether implementation intention could yield a short-term bias blind spot diminution. The results suggest that the UX practitioners perceived more cognitive bias in the ‘average UX practitioner’ than in themselves, and that implementation intention served to diminish this bias blind spot short-term for novices and experts alike.