The last time you had a performance review at your company, did you have the feeling that only recent events were being discussed, rather than the full year in review? Or when shopping for groceries, have you forgotten something essential that you ran out of at the beginning of the week, but remembered to buy that pot of ice-cream that you craved the night before?
I could keep on churning examples for ten more pages and you would probably identify yourself with most of them. I know you would because, just like me and most of the other eight billion human beings on this planet, we’re all subject to availability heuristics, or availability bias.
In this article, you’ll learn what availability heuristics are, how to use them in product management, and how they can improve user experience.
Between the late 60s and early 70s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman studied the psychological phenomenon of individuals valuing the memories that come first to mind instead of the most relevant.
They coined the term availability heuristics, later referred to as availability bias, which is a psychological mechanism that values speed over depth, meaning that your brain prefers to use information that’s readily available at the expense of being more comprehensive.
Marketeers have come to understand the availability bias and some have abused it to gain leverage over customers. Tinkering with the human mind is always a gray area when it comes to ethics, so I’ll try my best not to teach you how to fool someone.
The idea is to boost your own product thinking by avoiding biases and to ensure that your users perceive the value from your product in the best way possible.
Availability heuristics have a huge impact on your decision-making process. As a product manager, you can’t be a reductionist. Indulging your availability bias causes you to be narrow minded and miss out on opportunities,
No one expects you to eliminate your bias completely, however, being aware of it is crucial for allowing you to reevaluate your reasoning before making a decision. As a rule of thumb, every decision taken hastily is probably under the influence of availability heuristics, and if you’re not tight on time, it’s worth taking a deep breath and circling back to the problem statement.
These are some ways you can avoid falling prey of poor decision-making motivated by availability heuristics.
No two people think and perceive things the same way. Naturally, your biases are different from the ones your colleagues have, and the first things that pop to mind will probably differ from person to person. By harnessing the collection of biases, you can assemble a better picture of your solution, one that is more effective at observing a problem from multiple directions.
As a safeguard, make sure that you get feedback from people that are not in your immediate circle. In tight groups, people tend to share a lot of the same perceptions and memories. By moving away from your team towards colleagues from another squad, department, or even different hierarchy, you guarantee you’ll get a more holistic picture of the situation.
The opportunity solution tree, introduced by Teresa Torres, aims to plot down problems and solutions so that you can visualize if your connections between the two make sense. When trying to solve a conversion bottleneck, for example, you might think about that button your team implemented last month and isn’t performing as well as intended. Under availability heuristics, you could quickly assume that fixing the button fixes the conversion KPI.
However, in an opportunity tree, it becomes evident how this straightforward thought process is limiting and, most importantly, how unrelated it is with the main issue. You don’t need to fix your previous delivery, you need to fix a KPI. Sure, tackling the button from the example might be the best course of action, but there might be better opportunities hiding in plain sight that were just out of your mind, covered by bias.
One of the key characteristics of availability heuristics is its complete disregard for your own ignorance. The less you know about something, the easier it is for your brain to pick up a fast answer. People that are more knowledgeable about a topic tend to have more information readily available, and the ability to dive deeper beyond their surface thoughts.
Most product decisions involve a level of design and engineering to it. Addressing open product risks such as “can we build it” and “usability” should be delegated to the people that understand the most about it, not to generalists that know a little about a lot.
Every single product manager has come across this situation at least once: the sales team comes in with a client demand, an urgent one. The team scrambles after a C-level top-down and delivers according to the sales team specification. When the client is finally presented with the solution they asked for, it misses the mark and the delivery is useless.
The client captured an incomplete picture from the user that was passed along to the sales team and then made it to the C-level ears only to be further cascaded to the product team. In this case, the availability heuristics have been multiplied by a factor of three and only a fraction of the original opportunity made its way to delivery. That’s why it’s vital that product teams get first hand insights from users as often as possible.
There’s another side to the impact of availability heuristics on product thinking. Avoiding it yourself usually results in better team outputs and improved outcomes, but doubling down on it, when it comes to user behavior, can result in truly exponential results. There are three main ways in which you can take advantage of this phenomenon without breaking any ethical limits.
Apple has a remarkable ability to play with the availability heuristics of its users. By making their UI and tech ecosystem so tightly knitted, it guarantees that no information on how to use their devices gets lost. Users have to remember so little that the availability bias doesn’t impose the threat of frustrating experience due to information loss.
Google’s minimalistic material design is also another good example of availability heuristics acting in favor of the product and not against it. The clean and straightforward user interfaces mean, once again, that there isn’t much to be recollected when it comes to using their products, which means that quickly surfaced memories are usually all the memories you need.
When we say that a product is “intuitive,” nine times out of ten it’s because the product knows how to play around with the concept of availability heuristics. In contrast, think about your experiences with Salesforce or Jira, for example. Products that clutter so much their user interfaces with options and different configurations makes doing the easiest of the tasks seem like something a specialist only can do.
The majority of corporate knowhow on availability heuristics has flourished around marketing for good reason. Coca-cola is such a huge brand because it’s everywhere. When you think about soda, the availability bias will bring the fastest memory to mind, and if you see coca-cola everywhere you look, of course you think of it first.
In a product context, mainly thinking about the user experience, this can be adapted to make sure that a core value or feature from your product is present at multiple points of the user journey.
The best example, yet a simple one, is the “go back to homepage” workflow in most websites. You usually have three to four different ways of going back to the homepage in an effort to make the user remember at least one of those. These might be clicking the logo, pressing the browser back button, clicking a “go back” link on the page or using the navigation bar. Going back to the homepage is so important to an ideal navigation that you lose nothing by repeating its availability across the website.
Coca-cola’s main competitor, Pepsi, has less of a presence, so it plays a different availability heuristics game. By associating the brand with personalities that frequently come to the mind, Pepsi can piggyback on their strong and popular imprint to guarantee a space on consumers’ minds. Some of the most legendary ads in the industry are from Pepsi, like the colosseum collab between Britney Spears, Beyonce and Pink in 2004, or the controversial Kendall Jenner short from 2017.
Smaller and niche products do this all the time as well. By advertising your native integration capabilities with bigger products and platforms, you guarantee that users feel familiar with your product even though they’ve never heard about you. In a B2B context, for example, it’s frequent to see CMS platforms that connect with huge marketplace platforms such as Amazon and Shopify.
Using the availability heuristic power of a bigger product is, sometimes, the only way of delivering value, and this is reinforced by the ecosystems that big players create around their extensions, platforms or app stores. AdBlock is a phenomenon, but it’s completely reliant on Browser extensions from Chrome or FireFox. When people think about blocking ads, they find a solution for their browsers, rather than thinking of a standalone software.
Although playing with the availability bias has potential to put you one step ahead of the competition through an improved user experience, the most important thing I want you to take away from this article is, first and foremost, to be critical of your own thinking.
Availability bias is one of the many biases that we are all victims from and you must be vigilant about all of them. Human beings love to jump to conclusions, solving issues quickly, but product management is often less about doing something fast and more about doing it right.
Remember the tips I shared, and you’ll be halfway through becoming a product manager that can call themself a specialist at what we do.
Featured image source: IconScout
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