You may have come across a book called “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. It aims to teach readers how to communicate “ideas that stick”. That is, in the authors words, “what we can all do to make sure our own ideas register with others”.

Isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to do when we aim to create a great user instruction manual?

The idea of communicating a new concept concisely, in a way that others will remember it, is very applicable to manual writing.

Here’s one story, and accompanying analysis, from the book that particularly “stuck” with me, and contains a great lesson for manual writers:

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” 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. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there’s a good “listener” candidate nearby.) The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent.

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. In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless: How could you be so stupid?

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

Sound familiar?

This is exactly how incomprehensible user manuals get written: the author is suffering from the “curse of knowledge”.

It’s particularly common when the engineer who made the product is the one tasked with writing the manual for it. An external technical writer can often be a better option simply because he or she is looking at the product with fresh eyes.

You’ll have to read the book to discover the six methods Chip and Dan suggest to counteract the curse of knowledge, but one tip that can fit into the space of a blog post is this: get an ignorant proof reader.

Not chronically ignorant, but just ignorant of your product. Someone who is in exactly the same position as the people who will be using your product manual. Ask them to read the manual and give you honest feedback on where it just doesn’t make sense.

And, of course, we must mention doQer here. doQer’s “User Commenting” gives you, as a manual publisher, an amazingly powerful tool to collect this kind of feedback. Users read your manual and tell you honestly where it falls short. Essentially, you’re crowd-sourcing the task of “ignorant proof reader”.

User feedback is a useful feature for consumers to help each other, but it’s also a great tool to help you create manuals full of ideas that are “made to stick”.