Our values, beliefs and experiences inevitably influence our perspective. Look around you, what shapes do you see? The neat corners and straight lines of your screen, your table, your window and door frame? So it’s no surprise that when looking at the Coffers Illusion below you also see a number of rectangles.
Donaldson, J. and Macpherson, F. (July 2017), “The Coffer Illusion” in F. Macpherson (ed.), The Illusions Index. Retrieved from https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/42-coffer-illusion.
In fact, when people are shown the Coffers Illusion in the UK and US, around 80% see rectangles only.
However, when run as an experiment in Namibia, around half of the people shown this illusion only saw circles. The other half saw the circles first and then rectangles. Perhaps because Namibians live in a more natural environment, where curved edges are more plentiful and important.
Humans + Environment = Behaviour
It interests me that humans everywhere have the same visual system, but our individual perception of what we see changes – we perceive context and information through the lens of our values, beliefs and experience. This is our bias, and like optical illusions, our bias will remain compelling even when we are fully aware of its nature.
It is important to remember, that bias is our friend, it can help us to make accurate judgements. For example, in our culture we often interpret the colour red as a warning to stop, pause and observe. Nevertheless, as is often the case in design, we are not our users, and designing with only our own bias in mind will lead to design inaccuracies.
When making design decisions for products and services that other people will ultimately experience, we need to seek to understand, through research, and more specifically contextual research, the varied and plentiful perceptions of the full ecosystem of individuals who will be having a personal experience of the product or service that we are designing.
So, be kind to your bias, observe it, but then seek to learn, understand and be open-minded to the bias of others. Design inclusively by learning to see and understanding both the rectangles and circles.
Our researchers at Mercator can help with this and we’d love to talk to you.
kathren.neuss@mercator.group
Head of Research
