Your Product Design Is Biased—Here’s How to Fix It | Alexis Mook PhD

Hey groovers, welcome back to Behavioral Grooves. I'm Kurt Nelson and I'm Tim Houlihan. In this episode, we get curious about what it means to really find your groove at work and how one UX researcher is applying behavioral science in surprising ways inside a tech giant. Surprising ways. That's right, Tim.

Our guest is Alexis Mook. user researcher manager at IBM with a PhD in experimental psychology. She seems to be built for breaking products, that is, breaking them for the better. And Alexis helps design teams build tools that are not just beautiful, but usable and bias aware. We covered a lot of ground with Alexis, but if we had to narrow it all down, I'd say that there were three big insights that stuck with us, right?

First, I'd say the confirmation bias in design is real and dangerous. When product owners test their own designs, it skews the results. So Alexis advocates fiercely for third-party testing to reduce bias and protect the integrity of the insights. Yeah, and secondly, she reminded us that influence isn't just for end users. Her real magic is in how she navigates internal stakeholders, teaching product managers and developers the value of behavioral research, and standing up for science in an environment, Tim, I think you might have experienced this once or twice, in an environment that doesn't always understand it.

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