Cognitive Biases, Heuristics and Overdesign: an investigation on the unconscious mistakes of industrial designers and on their effects on product offering

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an empirical study aimed at understanding whether and to what extent cognitive biases determine overdesign. Overdesign occurs when designers develop product that exceed customers’ needs. This phenomenon – which results in higher costs and in some cases also in lower revenues – can be determined by some behavioral problems, as the willingness to develop the “best possible product”, regardless of customers’ needs. Thus, building on previous studies about cognitive biases, we have conducted a survey among industrial designers, in order to check whether overdesign is driven by cognitive biases. The preliminary evidence shows that this assumption is confirmed. However, the direction of the relationship is negative. This means that the higher the magnitude of the bias, the lower overdesign. Thus we claim that, in the sample analyzed in this study, we are not in presence of “cognitive biases”, but of “heuristics” that can mitigate overdesign. We conclude that designers’ experience can be the condition that must occur in order to have a bias turned into a heuristic.