I stole the blog title from 37 Signals recent post, Describe 37signals in 20 seconds or less. Describing anything in a succinct way is rather difficult, Made to Stick is an entire book devoted to the subject. In the book Chip and Dan Heath talk of how the “curse of knowledge” inhibits our ability to make something simple.
That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.
They talk about a study done in the 1990’s where one volunteer is designated as a tapper and one as a listener.
Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped.
Being all well known songs this seems pretty easy. However listeners guessed only 2.5% of the songs: 3 out of 120. The interesting thing is that before the experiment, tappers predicted that listeners would guess correctly 50% of the time.
The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?
When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself – tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune – all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.
We in the virtual worlds industry certainly suffer from the curse of knowledge. We already have the song stuck in our head. So how do we break through that? Like the guys from 37 Signals and their post, how would you make virtual worlds sound interesting to the mainstream user in 20 seconds or less?
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