False Confidence

Ask a roomful of people if they are above average at anything—driving, cooking, performing on the job—and more than half of them will raise their hands. We tend to overestimate our abilities in areas we feel comfortable with, and each of us feels a sense of overconfidence in at least an area or two of our lives.

The same slight distortion of judgment affects our assessment of ideas, especially those we’ve lived with for a while. Let’s say that you’ve been developing a product specifically designed to be user-friendly. After months spent pursuing your own internal goals for the project, you come up with a prototype that meets all of those goals and then some. It must be perfect, right? Every detail you planned for is there, and you achieved every goal you set. No need to spend time and money testing something that’s obviously as good as it can be.

You can see the problem here: meeting your own expectations isn’t the same as meeting those of your customers. You still need to run A/B tests to see if you really did hit the mark…and to see if you overlooked anything else while you pursued your design goals. As we saw in the “Tests-Are-Not-Exams Theorem”, this is precisely the point at which you should have a healthy dose of skepticism toward your product, not unwavering faith in it.

As yourself: Is my well-earned confidence overwhelming my better judgment?