Bridging the Gap: Navigating the Curse of Knowledge in UX
How Expertise Can Cloud Our Vision and What to Do About It
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias referring to the difficulty of imagining what it is like to not know something you already know. This bias impedes experts across fields, including UX. This article will look into research on the curse of knowledge, provide detailed examples of how it manifests in UX, and offer evidence-based strategies to overcome it.
The Curse of Knowledge
Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that affect how we perceive, remember, and reason about information. They stem from limits in attention, memory, and processing capacity. We can think of biases as cognitive shortcuts that we use to make sense of the world around us. They help us make quick decisions without needing to process every single detail surrounding us. However, these shortcuts can sometimes lead to mistakes in our thinking because they cause us to skip over logic and facts.
One such bias is the curse of knowledge, or else known as “the curse of expertise”. This refers to the difficulty in imagining what it is like to not know something you currently know.
The specific phenomenon of the curse of knowledge was first studied empirically by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff in 1975. Fischhoff developed an experimental method to examine “hindsight bias.” This is where outcomes seem more predictable after we already know what happened. In his study, participants were given a short story with four possible outcomes. Some participants were told which outcome was true, while others were not given this information. All participants then judged the likelihood of each outcome. Fischhoff found that participants provided extra information consistently assigned higher probabilities to the outcomes they were told were true.
The term “curse of knowledge” itself was coined a few years later, in 1989, by researchers Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber, who explored implications of the bias in economic transactions. They noted that different agents often have asymmetric information - sellers know more about their products than buyers do, for instance. They argued that the curse of knowledge causes informed agents to struggle to account for knowledge gaps even if they want to convey their expertise.
In 1990, psychologist Elizabeth Newton demonstrated the curse of knowledge in a series experiments while studying for her PhD. In her most famous experiment, she divided participants to “tappers” and “listeners”. She then asked “tappers” to choose among 120 well-known songs and then tap out the melody with their finger on a table, while “listeners” were asked to guess each song. When asked tappers expected the listeners to correctly identify half the songs (50% success rate). However, out of 120 songs only 3 were correctly guessed. (Newton, 1990, unpublished dissertation). This demonstrated that the tappers could not ignore their own knowledge of the song and greatly overestimated how easy it would be for listeners to determine the tune.
Further research by Keysar et al (2000) extended this finding to verbal communication. In their study, speakers overestimated how well listeners comprehended ambiguous references, because the speakers could not discount their own knowledge. A robust body of research since then has replicated the curse of knowledge bias across fields like memory, education, communication. The curse of knowledge can even affect the way our present selves — with our current level of knowledge and expertise — communicate with our future selves. For example, have you every found a to do list or a note you wrote in the past and found yourself unable to understand it? You have the curse of knowledge to blame!
Implications for UX
The curse of knowledge can affect UX and Product development in two main ways; the way we communicate with each other, the way we communicate with our users/Customers.
One of my biggest struggles when transitioning from academia to the industry was understanding the jargon coworkers used. Every other sentence included a new abbreviation or nonsensical business talk. That’s the curse of knowledge in action; experienced professionals are so used to jargon and company specific terminology that they forget that other people don’t share that knowledge. This, of course, isn’t limited to UX teams.
Cross-functional collaboration is also affected by the curse. UX teams are often involved in work with other departments and, if not careful, the curse of knowledge can impede our communication and impact. For example, experienced UXers might use industry terms without translating for a general audience, leading to confusion and loss of interest.
Visual communication can also be affected. This can be an issue for designers as well as researchers. For example, research by Xiong et al (2020) showed that when experts use graphs and figures to represent data, what they see is different than what non experts see, making their work less accessible and less engaging.
This cognitive bias doesn’t only affect the way we work with each other but can also have a negative impact on user experience. The curse of knowledge can cause designers to overlook the struggles of novice users and create interfaces based on false assumptions. When designers are highly familiar with a product, they forget the difficulties they once faced learning the workflows as a beginner, and are more likely to forget what users don’t know.
Overcoming the Curse
While the curse of knowledge presents challenges in UX, there are a few strategies we can employ to mitigate its effects:
You probably know what I’m going to say here… User research can play a key role in this process. Involve representative users directly in the design process through user research (e.g., moderated usability testing). Observe their struggles first-hand and collect feedback rather than guessing what might be difficult for them.
Establish a regular cadence of design reviews and critiques with colleagues not associated with the project to gain an outsider's perspective. Prepare specific examples where you are concerned the curse of knowledge may be affecting design choices and solicit their feedback. Ask probing questions about elements that seem confusing or overly complex. Document feedback and iterate rapidly on identified issues.
Avoid jargon, define your key terms, and use plain language when possible. Before moving full time into UX I spent almost 8 years teaching Psychology to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Overcoming the curse of knowledge is essential in order to teach effectively, and some ways to do this that can help us to be better communicators in UX include:
simplicity: Jargon doesn’t make you sound smart, it alienates your audience. Avoid abbreviations or define them if you really have to use them.
examples/stories: Use concrete examples and storytelling to make your point clearer.
Acknowledging and finding ways to overcome the bias of knowledge is important for UX professionals (and most experts). If unchecked it can negatively impact the way we collaborate as well as have a detrimental effect on user experience. Focusing on user research and user-centered design, using plain language, and seeking feedback from colleagues, we can break the curse and create more successful products/services.