Blame the Scapegoat
B. Reyes, Tamara Prstic, Ramon Flores · 2017
We present a study testing whether adding a scapegoat design (one that is clearly stylistically worse than the other designs and thus easier to critique) will make users feel more comfortable with giving more feedback on the other designs that the experimenters want feedback on. We found that participants who are shown a scapegoat design in parallel with other designs did not only provide more critiques, but also more substantial critiques - resulting in both higher quality and quantity of user feedback. Our results imply that the psychology of scapegoating can be successfully adapted to help the HCI community improve the effectiveness of user testing.