The Curse Of Knowledge, and How It’s Kneecapping Your Documentation.

Imagine I hand you a slip of paper with the words “Jingle Bells” on it. Your assignment: sit across a table from your best friend and (without humming or singing) tap the melody out on the table:

Tap Tap TAP
Tap Tap TAP
Tap Tap Tap Ta-tap

Before you tap, you lock eyes with your lifelong friend, and I ask the question: What’s the likelihood they guess the song correctly?

In a similar controlled study made famous in Chip and Dan Heath’s book “Made to Stick,” listeners correctly identified the song only 2% of the time, despite “tappers” estimating they’d get it right roughly 50% of the time.

Here’s what was happening: it’s impossible to tap out the melody of a song without hearing the song in your head. Psychologists call it the “curse of knowledge.”

When you write a Getting Started guide for users of your product, that’s you there, tapping out Jingle Bells on the table across from your user.

You are dramatically overestimating how helpful your guide is going to be, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve forgotten (with no hope of remembering) what it was like to “get started” with your product. Worse, you don’t even remember what knowledge you already had when you were “getting started,” so you’re literally doomed to write a guide that about 2% of your users will be able to do something with.

“But surely there’s nobody better to write the docs than me! I wrote all the code! I know all the features!”

Well sure. You’re going to have to be the one writing them. The problem is that you don’t know what words to use, because you don’t know the tune in your user’s head.

I do have good news, though.

Get them to sing it to you, then you can correct the lyrics. How do you get them to sing? More good news: they already are.

Every single ticket is a song they are singing about you, your team, and your product. They are not tapping on a table; they’re belting out the lyrics.

The Sustainable Support system builds teams full of lyricists, and then all you have to do is put them to work writing better docs than you could ever have imagined.

Not sure your agents are up for the task? Well of course they’re not. You haven’t trained them how to implement Sustainable Support. Buy the book and use the tool.

Users not singing loudly enough? Your only other option is to hire someone who doesn’t know your product and pay them to write the docs.

Final bit of good news: that’s a service we provide. With more than a decade in Customer Service (and almost no cursed knowledge of your product), in as little as a week* we can write a better “Getting Started” guide for your product than you could ever hope to.

Don’t take it personally, though. You’ve got the song stuck in your head.

*After purchase of an audit, we’ll communicate the exact timeline, which depends on availability.