I’ve been reading Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and one of the things that really stood out to me was his presentation of loss aversion. I know that humans are loss averse, that isn’t news to me. But what I had never really thought about before was this idea in the context of adversarial collaboration in the workplace.
As a UX Strategist, almost all of my collaboration is adversarial. I am a staunch supporter of the user’s experience, sometimes to the detriment of the business plan. You might wonder, though, why that’s a problem. Shouldn’t the UX guy be supporting the user’s experience? Well, yes… but every other member of the team is a staunch supporter of their [insert focus or metric]. It is not often that every member of the team, from sales to support, is being held accountable by their supervisors for supporting or producing a positive user experience.
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