How to create valuable things that people actually want to use
- Travis M., Spencer Greenberg, and Igor Scaldini
- May 14
- 10 min read
Short of time? Read the key takeaways.
🎯 Value to others beats personal interest. A common mistake creators make is assuming that what fascinates them will fascinate their audience. If you value impact, we recommend focusing instead on what your specific audience finds useful, actionable, or genuinely relevant to their lives.
📊 Your impact depends on comparison, not just quality. What matters is how much more value you provide compared to available alternatives. If similar creations already exist and are better, your creation's real-world impact could actually be negative.
🔎 Novelty can be found in many dimensions. Something can be novel in content, format, audience, scope, etc. Useful strategies for finding novelty include targeting underserved audiences, rejecting common assumptions, or combining things not typically paired together. See full article for more.
⚡ Engagement is a feature, not an afterthought. Valuable work still fails if people find it dull or effortful. Making your creations interactive, emotionally compelling, visually rich, appropriately challenging, and concise significantly improves how people engage with them.
🧪 Real users will surprise you. Due to the "curse of knowledge," experts routinely misjudge what audiences will understand or find useful. Testing early with real people and collecting critical feedback is one of the most effective ways to improve what you create. See the full article for some examples of the most common feedback we receive in testing.
Have you ever made something you were proud of, only to find yourself wondering why people aren’t engaging with it?
One problem is that the internet is bursting with content. It is estimated that around 707,372 new websites are created every single day. And there are known to be more than 3.98 billion indexed webpages in existence, with an unknown number of unindexed pages on top of that. When you’re competing with all that, even when your work is accurate and genuinely useful, if people do not feel drawn to engage with it, use it, or come away feeling that it has changed how they think or act, its impact will likely be limited.
At Clearer Thinking, this is something we think about a lot. We don’t always get it right, but we’ve done a lot of experimentation regarding how to make content our readers find valuable, and received a ton of feedback on our work over the years, so we think we have some insights that might help you, if you’re someone who makes things (or wants to). We learned these lessons while making informative, educational content, but we believe they apply more generally - whether you’re writing something, presenting ideas, creating a product, or otherwise.
Today, we want to share a simple framework that we’ve developed while building more than 90 free, interactive educational tools and writing hundreds of articles. It doesn’t address the issue of how to get your work seen by other people (which is a marketing issue), but it does address how to improve the chances that those who see it appreciate it.
1. Start with what would be genuinely valuable
The first thing we tell anyone who writes for us is our most fundamental rule and guiding principle:
Everything we create should be focused on providing value to our readers, based on what they care about. |
This might sound obvious. After all, you probably wouldn’t be trying to make something you didn’t think was valuable in some way. But a common trap we often see authors fall into is thinking that because X is interesting to the author, X will be valuable to many readers. If you're creating for others, and not just yourself, it helps a lot to aim to understand what your audience finds valuable.
Here are some ways we encourage people who write for us to ensure that their work adds value to the lives of readers:
Consider including a checklist, framework, or list of tips for how to apply the insights of your work to the reader's own life
Aim to equip the reader with new concepts that help them navigate the world better or make sense of their experiences
Whenever you introduce a concept, include specific examples that show how the ideas play out in real situations
Correct common misconceptions about the ideas you’re engaging with
Explain the practical implications of ideas (e.g., what the reader might do differently as a result of understanding this content)
Offer reflection questions that help readers connect the material to their own experience
Link to deeper resources
The reason we’re so focused on adding value is that we want our work to have a positive impact. If you want the same for your own work, regardless of what kind of things you’re creating, then thinking about this equation is a simple but useful place to start:
Impact = average value provided per person ✕ number of people reached
Despite being a simplification, this equation contains a key truth: the impact of your work is determined (at least partly) by how much value you give each person and how many people you reach. So, our first helpful tip is this: Instead of drifting by default towards making what is easy for you to make, what you think sounds impressive, or what you find personally interesting, try to find the value you can offer others. Of course, it is important to be interested in what you create, but that's not sufficient to add value. When you’re drawn to make something, consider asking yourself:
Question 1: ”How do I provide more value to the user/viewer/reader?”
2. Build in your sphere of competence
There will be times when you could make something valuable, but you aren’t the right person (or team) to do so. To see why, let’s return to the equation from above, but make it a little more complicated by incorporating another key truth about your impact:
Impact = average increase in value provided per person, compared to alternatives
✕ number of people reached
This version of the equation asks you to take into account the value that people who use your creation would have gotten if they hadn’t used your creation — that is, how much more value you provided than alternatives. If your creation is worse than the average similar product or resource, it's even possible for the “average increase in value provided per person, compared to alternatives” to be negative (if people would have typically found superior products or resources instead)!
Of course, what is great for one audience may be very different than what is great for another audience. Whatever you make won't be great for everyone. And it's very rare that one thing is better for all audiences. But, ideally, there should be at least some audience that finds what you are creating better than average in its category.
All of this means that we suggest you ask yourself another question:
Question 2: “Given my knowledge and skills and the amount of effort I'm willing to expend, what can I create that will be significantly better than average (for my intended audience)?"
This question asks you to evaluate whether the thing you want to make is something you are well-positioned to create. Staying within your sphere of competence helps you execute projects with an above-average of quality, thereby increasing your impact. That doesn't mean you need to know how to execute a project when you start; pushing the edge of your ability is often a great idea, with the assumption that you’ll learn and improve through the process of creation.
3. Look for what is missing
In the previous section, we suggested you ask yourself whether you can produce something “better than average” for a particular audience. One way to increase your chances that your work is better than everything that’s already out there is to make something novel in at least some way. Note that there are many ways that something can be novel. For instance, it can be novel in content, format, audience, scope, and so on.
Here are some heuristics you can use to make it easier to find novel ideas. Some are specifically for producing informational resources, while others apply more generally:
Consider topics that are neglected. Sometimes a topic just won't get much attention, even if it's something that is valuable.
Consider formats that are neglected. For example, this is one reason we make free, browser-based interactive tools.
Target an audience with information they wouldn’t usually get to see. This is an incredibly varied approach that includes things as different as: designing statistical reasoning resources for journalists who aren't trained in math, setting up a platform where famous music producers dispense production advice, educational programs for incarcerated people, and so on.
Combine things that aren't usually combined. For example, Duolingo found a lot of success combining language learning with elements of games (i.e., gamification).
Reject a common assumption. This approach can lead you to think about a topic or resource in a novel way.
Observe people using something and make a resource that helps for where they typically get stuck. This has the added bonus of giving you more confidence that your resource will have an audience waiting for it.
Consider whether certain approaches are neglected. For example, bringing a scientific, evidence-based approach to a topic that is typically not thought of that way.
If you're stuck regarding how to apply this, one approach goes as follows: write down the broad topics you’ve got expertise in, along with a bunch of different formats and audiences, and then look at different combinations to see whether anything strikes you as valuable and exciting.
However, it’s worth being aware that sometimes the reason something hasn’t been done before is that it’s not worth doing. Novelty is not a substitute for value, but it is a place you can often find value if you look hard enough.
4. Make it exciting enough that people will actually engage with it
Even highly valuable or novel creations can fail if they feel too dull or too effortful or not interesting enough. Of course, what makes something interesting will vary substantially across formats and audiences, but in general, it will tend to improve your creations if you can make them:
Interactive. E.g., quizzes, mini-games, asking questions directly to readers.
Relevant. Think about how the topic or subject of your creation shows up in people’s lives and speak directly to that. Can your audience apply things they’ve learned from your creation?
Emotionally engaging. E.g., you might try to evoke emotions like surprise, awe, or even empathy through compelling anecdotes, stories or demonstrations.
Visual. E.g., charts, diagrams, or beautiful or funny images.
Memorable. E.g., give people memory aids, include recaps at the end of sections, quiz people on the content, or give them a summary document/email.
(The right level of) challenging. You need to find the sweet spot between the boringness of being too easy and the frustration of being too difficult. Testing can help you find the thread this needle, and it can also help to make some things optional/skippable.
Concise. You don’t want to make people feel like their time is being wasted. Try to communicate things as concisely as you can (while still being effective) and consider whether it might help to make some content optional. Of course, if you're a reader of our work, you know we violate this one a lot!
Formats like workshops lend themselves very well to the inclusion of these features, but it can be a lot harder if you’re writing to be published in print or online. That’s why we use our sister platform Guided Track to make interactive, browser-based tools that can include more of these features than an article typically can. Interactive tools can ask questions, adapt to responses, and more deeply encourage reflection.
5. Test early and use feedback to improve
There’s a cognitive bias called “the curse of knowledge,” which disposes people with expertise on a subject to fail to sufficiently recognize or account for the degree to which others lack that expertise. This can be seen, for example, in studies showing that learning facts about a topic worsens people’s ability to predict how well novices will do on a related trivia quiz.
If you’re an expert on the thing you’re making, then you probably know more about it than your intended audience. Therefore, the curse of knowledge shows why it can be a mistake to assume that you will know, on your own, whether your audience will find your creation useful, engaging, or even understandable. In practice, real users will often surprise you.
This is one reason that testing can help so much. Before releasing our interactive tools, we typically run each of them through two rounds of testing:
Alpha testing with around 40 people, recruited through our sister platform Positly.com, which was designed to make it easy to recruit study participants.
Then, after incorporating that first round of feedback, we do:
Beta testing through our beta-tester mailing list (which you can sign up for here, if you would like to beta test our tools in the future). This produces feedback from our real users.
In both rounds of testing, we ask people to try it out and answer questions like:
What did you like best about this tool?
What did you dislike most about this tool?
Did anything in this tool confuse you? (If so, please describe)
Did you notice any technical errors, glitches, or typos in this tool?
How useful did you find this tool?
How much did you enjoy using this tool?
Do you think you will use what you've learned in this tool in the future?
Would you recommend this tool to a friend? (And why or why not)
Do you have any additional feedback that you haven't shared with us yet?
We read through the feedback we receive, and we often learn great lessons from it. Across many thousands of feedback comments, we’ve also noticed some themes emerge. Since we think these themes provide additional value, here’s a few of them:
Communicate usefulness early and clearly. Tell your audience why they should care about what you’re giving them. Otherwise, why should they bother spending time with what you created?
People typically want more examples. If you can think of a way to include more examples without disrupting the resource, consider including them.
Respect people’s time by telling them how long something will take and incorporating progress indicators to show how much they have left to go through.
Be concise.
Know your audience. If you’re designing for a specific level of prior understanding, then make sure your content is created and pitched at that level and is very clear about that. If you’re designing for multiple levels, use techniques like making some content optional to give different people experiences that cater to their level.
User testing (and asking for critical feedback during the process) is one of the most effective ways to make whatever you are creating more valuable.
What can you take from all this?
You do not need a giant team to create something that's valuable to people. If creating value is one of your goals, here’s a final recap of tips to keep in mind:
Reflect on whether you can produce something better than average for the audience you have in mind, and if not, consider adjusting what you're creating or who the audience is.
Look to produce something that's novel in at least one dimension - which might be the style, format, content, audience, or something else about it.
Make your creation engaging, for instance, by making it interactive, emotionally compelling, or of high relevance to the audience.
Test early with real people and elicit their critical feedback, then make improvements based on this testing
Ultimately, creating things that are valuable to others is not just about sharing good information; it’s about creating something people will actually engage with, learn, and benefit from.
In this article, we’ve mentioned a couple of platforms that are sister projects of Clearer Thinking and that we use regularly in the process of developing educational resources. They’re connected to our broader mission of improving research and psychological education. If you’d like to check them out, here they are again:
Guided Track is a completely browser-based (no downloads required) platform for building apps, surveys, educational modules, studies, interventions, tools, and prototypes.
Positly helps you recruit participants so you can test what you build, gather feedback, and run studies more easily.
