Users rely heavily on the first piece of information they see.

<aside> ℹ️ The initial information that users get affects subsequent judgments. Anchoring often works even when the nature of the anchor doesn't have any relation with the decision at hand. It's useful to increase perceived value.

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Anchoring is a cognitive bias that occurs if someone presents information in a way that limits an audience’s range of thought/reference. To suggest values or list options this way is to frame a “desirable” choice/reply. As anchoring can distort users’ needs, problems and more, it can impair ideation for design teams.

Used intentionally, anchoring (also called priming or focalism) can be an effective technique. Parents who ask their children “How often do you want to tidy your room: every day or every other day?” can appreciate its value. It’s also an age-old marketing strategy—appearing in everything from restaurant menus to car showrooms—that encourages customers to pick items because they’re a “good deal” compared with the most expensive offering (the anchor).

Anchoring is often used in user experience (UX) design. When designers apply it, they take advantage of users’ inability to make wholly critical judgments in the moment, and so prompt them towards actions that should be desirable for both the users and the brand.

Sometimes, anchoring happens by accident and can mess up how design teams come up with ideas. It's when one piece of information affects how everyone judges other info, making them jump to conclusions.

Anchoring works in two ways:

1. Values offered: If you present big numbers, people tend to think big, and with small numbers, they think small.
2. The way things are said: Using words like "just roughly" can make people feel more confident about wrong answers.

For instance, when people were asked to guess the Eiffel Tower's height using scales as references, many guessed way too high because the big scale influenced their idea of what was reasonable. Without that influence, they might have made better guesses based on the tower's actual height, not someone else's idea. So, instead of helping, the scale led them astray.

© Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Here are some tips to prevent anchoring bias

• Frame/reframe problem statements and questions to your team and users in a way that permits objectivity. Word things so that others can leverage their imagination, rationality and judgment without being hemmed in by subjective views or assumptions.
• Don’t rush to treat symptoms with solutions. Pay close attention to your user research and how you empathize with your users. What’s the big-picture view? How do the users’ needs look from a holistic aspect? If you jump to conclusions early on, you can cause others to miss the real problem and chase shadows of it instead.
• Encourage divergent thinking, lateral thinking and out-of-the-box thinking as much as possible – instead of committing to a potentially flawed view of the users, their contexts and problem/s involved.

<aside> ⚠️ Remember, bias can also creep into the later stages of ideation (in convergent thinking) and beyond, so be careful how you word things.

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Resources

What is Anchoring?

The Anchoring Principle