Are you familiar with the curse of knowledge concept? I (maybe wrongly) assume you are.
[It] occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.
Wikipedia provides a simple example as that common feeling when playing charades:
The actor may find it frustratingly hard to believe that his or her teammates keep failing to guess the secret phrase, known only to the actor.
To get meta, I had the same feeling with this phrase. When I went to grab the definition while writing this, I thought, “whoever reads this of course knows about the curse of knowledge!”
As if you also went to school for psych research. Or have spent too much time trying to understand the inter-workings of imposter syndrome. Or read (and remembered) the same productivity books.
You might have this curse…
There’s an entire field of work around user testing that exists simply because those who make things have the curse of knowledge, unable to imagine not knowing what they know.
Design, then content -or- content, then design?
Even without the curse, you started a blog and then got content.
How recently have you structured your site with consideration of its content? If it was two years ago, what percentage of your content hasn’t been considered in how the site’s structured?
Ideally you’d take a content-first approach, have a body of content, and then design a site structure around that content.
But the curse of knowledge, the blog problem, and simply not knowing where to start can make restructuring your site in a reasonably painless way
I’ve been working on a way to make this portable. Here is a quick preview of the process and what we’ll be talking about (rough structure still in progress):
- Content audits with pattern recognition exercise
- From automated archives to curated hubs
- Navigability users and search engines alike love
- Aligning calls to action with key content
- Identifying and fixing content issues (dynamic content, etc)
- Content pruning decision tree
- Changing, moving, migrating things the right way
- Quick and dirty user testing