I picked up the book Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath as a guide to create easy-to-remember messages to use as a resource for the new design of my company website.  They say the most memorable or sticky messages have six characteristics – Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional and Stories. You can remember these by using the memorable acronym SUCCESs.

For years I have been intrigued by the concept of a meme – an idea that self-replicates by spreading through a human population because of some set of compelling properties. Urban legends, advertising jingles and other cultural particles somehow spread and then never leave us completely. What if you could create a message for your own product or service that is a memorable as “I wish I were and Oscar Meyer wiener” or spreads as quickly as a story about McDonald’s using earthworm meat in their hamburgers? The book analyzes these phenomenal examples to uncover the six common traits of stickiness. This is the first book I have read that presents a formula to construct sticky messages for your self. It still may not be easy, but at least you can judge the quality of your message in each of these six areas.                                                                                                                    

One reason you may have trouble crafting a memorable message is because we suffer from what the book calls the “Curse of Knowledge”. This curse is an inability to understand why others don’t get what we are talking about. That is, we have so much knowledge about some particular area that we cannot imagine how someone else doesn’t understand what we know. 

A brilliant example of this is from a study as Stanford called the Tapper and Listener game. It is described in Made to Stick this way: 

Tappers receive a list of twenty-five 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 the listener (by knocking on the table). The listener’s job was to guess the song based on the rhythm being tapped… 

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… 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 tapper’s expressions when the listeners guess “Happy Birthday to You” for the “The Star-Spangled Banner” are priceless: How could you be so stupid? 

Indeed, the stupidity conclusion is often applied to customers that don’t understand the power of our products.   It is also applied to an outsourced software development team that has limited insight into what you need in your software. Add in the cultural differences and physical distances of offshore outsourcing and the rush to judgment is inevitable.  I started reading this book to help improve my website but then got insight into the software specification process. It’s not that you want to write software specifications that your offshore team will never forget. It’s that you want them to really understand what is needs. The key to this is telling stories.  

The book presents evidence that “mental simulations” improves performance. If you practice something in your mind then you have a better chance of carrying out the activity successfully. When your message is a story, it is a type of mental simulation.  

When you specification includes stories on how your software will be used then the developers have a better chance of developing it correctly.     

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