For almost two years, I’ve been working on the development and launch of a portable electronic health record for consumers to carry on a USB thumb drive. This is a very challenging undertaking for reasons I’ll likely share in a future post. But today something happened that prompts me to write on the danger of familiarity. I see it all the time in product development, marketing, sales system development, and even among entrepreneurs raising money for new ventures.

We were presenting a beta version of our portable health record to a group of first responders (EMTs). When you launch the health record, one of the first things you see is a collection of pictures of everyone whose records are on the drive (i.e. a family). You then click the picture of the person whose records you wish to view. This is a practical feature in an emergency where the patient may not be conscious because it allows a visual verification of whose records a doctor is viewing.

When the first responders viewed the screen featuring the pictures of the people whose records were on the drive, very few of them knew to click the pictures to access the records.

So what? You ask. Isn’t that why you do user testing?

Sure. But what struck me is that for a moment, I was actually surprised.

I have become so familiar with the software that I lost my ability to see it as a first time user would. This is a condition with which most if not all of us are afflicted. As soon as we learn something, we suddenly forget what it was like to not know what we just learned.

In product development, this condition is generally overcome by user testing – as was the case with the portable health record. But how often do you user test your marketing… your sales processes… your pitch to venture capitalists… on people who are as ignorant to what you are selling as your audience is?

It’s not that it can’t be done. We just rarely do it.

You know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a presentation that was created by someone who is too familiar with what they are talking about and has lost empathy for the audience - you. It turns people off.

The most painful examples in my experience are seen in venture capital presentations. This is especially tough because in many cases the investor audience actually is more ignorant (with respect to the business proposition) than the audience of prospective buyers for whatever the business sells. Entrepreneurs often fail to realize that they actually need to explain the problem that they are addressing to a group of investors who, unlike their prospective buyers, may not be able to identify first-hand with this problem at all.

I hate the caution that marketers get to write/speak for an eighth grade audience. I don’t disagree. I just think it’s a tragedy to compromise the power and elegance of language. But don’t assume that because you are successfully communicating at an eighth grade level that you have purged your message of all assumptions of familiarity. One has little if anything to do with the other.

As in the case of the entrepreneur pitching investors, your audience may be highly intelligent – and therefore able to handle a flowery vocabulary, but totally unfamiliar with what you are selling. No matter how much you dumb down the language, you simply have to start from the beginning and empathize with your audience.

User test whenever you can. But at the very least, objectively challenge every assumption of pre-existing knowledge that you make in your communications.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 2:04 am and is filed under Direct Marketing, Powerful Presentations, Real-Time Case Studies, Sales & Business Development, Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.