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Survivorship bias 0:29
A 29-second explainer of Survivorship bias, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Survivorship bias demo
What this video covers
Survivorship bias is the error of focusing only on what made it through, while ignoring what didn’t - and the lessons those failures hold. In UX, it’s the trap of studying only the users who stayed: your analytics, reviews and surveys are full of survivors, and silent about everyone who hit a wall and left.
Like the wartime planes, the obvious move - reinforce where you see the damage - is exactly wrong: the planes hit elsewhere never came back to be counted. Your product is the same. The bullet holes you can see are the survivors' complaints; the fatal ones are in the users who already left and aren't in your data at all.
