One unit of something feels like the optimal amount.
<aside> âšī¸ Unit bias is the tendency for individuals to want to complete a unit of a given item or task. People want to finish whatever portion they have no matter the size, it is a perception of completion that is satisfying to people. This has been widely studied in regards to portion control and healthy eating. Individuals will eat more when portion sizes are larger because of their desire to complete the task.
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Most of the research on this bias was conducted in the context of studying healthy eating habits. The findings suggest that people tend to adhere to the established norm of food consumption, even if that norm is excessively large for them. These studies also concluded that, for a healthy lifestyle, it's best to limit the serving sizes of different dishes.
In an office environment, this bias is seen in employees' work settings. Platforms like Trello, JIRA, Asana, Basecamp, and others often utilize Kanban boards, tasks, and columns that we are responsible for or assigned to. For those who have been working on various projects for a long time, the desire to read all emails in Gmail, view all notifications in Slack and Skype, and complete all tasks in a column by the end of the day is familiar. Not all employees have this desire to complete a fixed portion of work, but I have observed it in a significant number of colleagues over the years, leading me to include this bias in the list.
Regarding products, understanding this tendency is valuable in the design of applications that involve working with lists or queries. If we want to encourage users to process requests, choosing the right amount of visible requests at a time and incorporating page numbering can greatly influence their engagement. If a user sees that there are 36 pending requests, they will be less motivated to tackle the task compared to when we spread out these 36 requests across 6 pages with 6 requests each.