No. 01 Curse of Knowledge

The people who build a product know every button, feature & shortcut.

New users don’t. So they guess, get stuck… & leave. Ouch.

Watch someone new try it. Don’t help.

In 1989, economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein & Martin Weber named it: once you know something, you can’t un-know it.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton had people tap famous songs on a table. Tappers bet listeners would guess half. They got 3 of 120.

• Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber, “The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings,” Journal of Political Economy (1989)
• Elizabeth Newton, Stanford PhD dissertation (1990), as told in Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007)

Save this for the next time someone says “it’s intuitive, trust me.”