You think you know, but you (should) have no idea

Are you up for a quick experiment? Good! Do you remember the oh-so-great song Zombie from 1994 by The Cranberries? If not, or if you just want to enjoy it again, listen to it here. Run along now and listen to it, I’ll be waiting here for you. No no, don’t cheat, off you go!

Good. Now, replay the song in your head. Do you have the chorus in your head  (yes, pun intended)? Repeat it to yourself a few times:

In your head, in your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey. What’s in your head

Good, you are getting the rythm. Now, start tapping the song with your fingers while you play it over and over again in your head. Dum-dum-dum-dumdumdidum-dum. You may look a bit stupid, but hey, you’re grooving.

Now stop playing the song in your head, but keep hitting that desk with your fingers. Does the rythm you hear while tapping actually make any sense to you now? Or is it just a random thumping sound with no meaning whatsoever? If the answer is ”random thumping sound” – then excellent, lesson learned! (If not, keep on reading, you’ll need it.) You have been struck by the curse of knowledge. While you played the song in your head the tapping sound made perfect sense, you had the knowledge and expertise on what those sounds actually meant. When you ”remove” the song from your head, it’s just a stream of jibberish and actually quite annoying to hear. Don’t look, but your neighbour colleague is probably thinking about smacking you on the head right now.

Whenever you write copy, design a web site, make a presentation, create a user flow or actually do anything where you need to get a message across and your target audience is not experts on your level, be very aware of the curse of knowledge. As an expert, you have a wealth of references, jargons, ideas and cases that makes perfect sense to you and you are so used to communicate using the perfect terms and the correct acrynoms. To your web site visitor or audience, this may actually mean nothing at all. Your e-commerce stock system is internally probably very well defined and easy for you to understand, but to your customer it probably makes no sense why you keep a certain item in that very strangely named category. What will happen is that your customer won’t be able to to find the item or understand your shop and thus won’t buy anything.

Look at your communication, not as an expert, but as a customer. Try to step out of your world of knowledge and look at what you are presenting without your goggles. Does it make any sense anymore? If not, redesign, rewrite, rethink. It will pay off.

Next lesson is to think of another song, fire it up in your head and visit your colleague. Thump away on his/her desk, ask what song your playing and see for yourself what the curse of knowledge does to your message.

Related posts:

1. Dealing with bad comments
2. Beautiful newsletter from Ann Taylor
3. Kvällsposten-salesgirl, part II
4. Why Twitter sucks (as a sales channel)
5. Keys to a successful web site project

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