Masked by Mastery: The Curse of Knowledge

How to “unlearn” what you know in order to provide a better product or service to your customers.

This is the first article in a series where I will share some of my learnings about building and launching products and services for companies of all sizes - from small businesses and tech startups all the way up to Fortune 500 mega-corporations.

Can it be bad to know too much? Is it possible to be “blinded by science”? When creating a new product or service, being an expert can make it hard for you to understand how a typical customer might interact with your business. The more you know about something, the more challenging it is to put yourself in the shoes of someone without your level of understanding. This is often referred to as “The Curse of Knowledge.”

How can you combat The Curse of Knowledge? You can employ empathy and testing.

EMPATHY is defined as seeing things from another’s point of view and imaging yourself in their place. There are three types of empathy. Affective Empathy involves understanding others’ emotions. Somatic Empathy occurs when you physically experience what another person is feeling. Cognitive Empathy involves understanding what another person is thinking in response to a situation. All forms of empathy come into play when trying to combat The Curse of Knowledge, but Cognitive Empathy may be the most important type relating to most products and services.

To better empathize with your users or customers, start by thinking about the different types of people they may be. Every human is unique, so it is impractical to customize your business for every person. Instead, you can identify sets of similar target customers. This is often done by creating a series of “personas” or “audiences,” which are convenient ways of grouping customers by common attributes. For example, your small business might serve Students, Families, and Empty-nesters.  Segmenting your customers in this way makes it easier to design offerings for them.

To uncover biases or errors in your product or service design, you need to TEST. Don’t assume that you and your expert team have designed the perfect product or service until real customers have experienced it. (See the classic TV show, “The Odd Couple” for a lesson on assumptions 😀.)

Put your concepts in front of people before you roll them out (ideally, before you even build them). Bounce concepts off co-workers, preferably brand new employees or staff working in different areas of the business who are less likely to suffer from The Curse of Knowledge. Use mockups or prototypes to get feedback from actual and potential customers. Get qualitative feedback from these “user tests” to help identify issues. Incorporate this feedback into revised prototypes, and then test again!

User testing can be done in-person - even with just paper mockups - or online, using a tool such as Usertesting.com. You can hire a user researcher to “moderate” these tests, learn enough to do it yourself, or design unmoderated tests that run themselves.

If you can, build functional prototypes of your new product or service and “launch” it to the market to allow actual customers to interact with it. This does not have to mean building the entire product or service for real…you could find a way to put a minimally-functioning facsimile of the product in front of your audience and let them have at it. Collect quantitative data from the actual usage, analyze this data, and use it to refine the offering. If your product is web-based, you can use an A/B testing platform such as Adobe Target.

Iterate! Repeat qualitative and/or quantitative testing until you are ready to build and launch your actual product/service. But don’t stop there! Analyze actual usage after launch, and continually learn and refine your offering.

This really works! Here are some examples from my real-world product experience:

At Adobe, I led a team to overhaul the global storefront for Creative Cloud. We employed brainstorming and workshopping, including the very effective Design Sprint.  We also did extensive qualitative and quantitative testing. Adobe’s products are complex, and its subscription offerings can be confusing to customers (even if it makes sense to experts at Adobe!). Our testing uncovered specific customer challenges caused by this complexity and led to a complete overhaul, which greatly simplified the visual design and user experience. The result was well received by customers and it also substantially improved the financial performance of the storefront. A win-win!

At a small business in the healthcare space, I developed a digital version of the patient “intake” process, which collects critical medical history information prior to the patient’s visit. Based on customer feedback and usage of the new system, I identified areas in the process that were obvious to me, but not obvious to patients. For instance, the contact information for a child patient should be that of the parent. Customers would not hesitate to abandon the process if they hit any roadblock or annoyance. We simplified the steps to focus on the most important data (for example, by not asking for insurance details that were already collected over the phone). This simpler process was quicker and easier for cusotmers, resulting in a higher completion rate, greatly reducing staff workload.

The Curse of Knowledge makes it difficult to walk in the shoes of your customers. You can’t truly “unlearn” what you know. But you can employ empathy, testing, and a little humility to create great products and services that your customers will love.