Pensieves & Crystal Balls: Mitigating Bias When Investigating Past Behavior and Future Intent

As design researchers, we’re constantly trying to ascertain what people do and why.

Often this means digging into what people have done in the past and asking them to predict what they’d do in the future. There’s only one problem: people are notoriously bad at accurately recalling past events and reliably forecasting future ones.

In this talk we’ll explore key ways in which memories and predictions can be unreliable, what this means for our craft, and strategies to mitigate some of these biases for even better research.