Cursed by expertise

As designers, we use a lot of jargon — UX, point of view, prototyping, etc — that others don’t understand. The consequence? Great ideas don’t make it into the world.

So why do we do this despite being people who pride ourselves in taking the point of view of others? It’s because we suffer from a curse of expertise.

Psychologist, Elizabeth Newton designed a simple game to show how the curse of expertise works. Newton assigned people one of two roles: “tappers” and “listeners.” She asked the “tappers” to pick out a popular song such as Happy Birthday and to tap out the rhythm by knocking on the table. She asked the “listeners” to guess the song based on the rhythm and asked the “tappers” to predict the likelihood that the “listeners” would guess correctly.

The result?

Out of 120 songs tapped out, “listeners” only guessed three songs correctly or 2.5% while the “tappers” predicted they would guess 50% correctly? Why were the tappers so optimistic?

When the “tapper” taps out the song, they hear the tune playing along with the taps. Go ahead. Give it a try — tap out “Happy Birthday.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head.

Meanwhile the listener just hears the taps. The “tappers” are surprised by how difficult it is for the “listener” to pick out the tune. This is the curse of expertise. Once we know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. Our expertise has “cursed” us.

So how do we overcome the curse of expertise? The first is to not learn anything. The second is to use simple language and concrete stories to communicate our ideas and ways of working.

Twenty years ago, Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced the original iPod as “1000 songs in your pocket.” Jobs could have introduced it as an MP3 player with a 5GB hard drive, Firewire connectivity, high speed music synchronization to iTunes. He presented the idea using simple language. He also shared a story how the frustration of being on the road and not bringing the CD you wanted to listen to and how the iPod allows people to bring their whole music library with them in their pocket.

So if we want our great ideas to go farther, let’s draw on our expertise in the studio but leave it at the door when bringing our ideas going out into the world