Most of us might have encountered frustrating moments while checking a website or mobile application. A good web designer must ensure that their design is user friendly. To create a good design a designer must learn to take good decisions. Here is a simple designer’s guide to make better design decisions. It includes some common decision traps and its solutions.

Availability Heuristic

In some cases while evaluating a specific topic or concept, we recall something or a solution comes to our mind quickly. This mental shortcut which depends on the solutions that quickly comes to our mind to make decisions is known as Availability Heuristic. This gives a feeling that the things recalled or that quickly came to the mind are so important that we fail to see the alternate solutions. As a result the designer makes a decision with that recent bit of information without even considering the whole information relevant to the design decision. The only solution is that the designers must identify their circle of competence and take the advice of various experts to control availability heuristic.

Focalism bias

Focalism Bias is the inability of a designer to look forward while creating a design. The designer makes a decision with the initial piece of information and creates a design according to it. It is really hard to take your focus away from a decision once made by the mind. To avoid this situation a designer must learn to remain attentive to their front line operations. Never simplify explanations and ensure that you focus on hidden problems because these can turn into serious threats if neglected.

Optimism Bias

Optimism Bias is a situation where the designer thinks only about the positive aspects and creates a design accordingly. While making decisions the focus is mainly on the positive side which can frustrate the users who experience the negative aspect. The solution to this is the pre-mortem exercise where a space is created to discuss about the decision and the threats concerning the decision.

Overconfidence Bias

In this kind of situation, the designer is over confident about his/her ability in accurately evaluating the present and making the perfect design decision. However they fail to understand what their users think and end up in trouble. This results in an overload of information and confusion in terminology. The solutions to mitigate overconfidence bias are:

• Conduct user research
• Actively seek case studies

These are some of the decision traps every designer encounters while creating a design. Web designing and web development is a very fastly growing and competitive industry where the users need the best experience. Web designing and web development companies require designers who can meet this demand. Simple negligence and over confidence can lead to very serious problems.