Useful thinking tools: insights from design and teaching

I recently came across Scott H Young's article, Twenty-Five Useful Thinking Tools, and two of his frameworks stopped me in my tracks. Not because they were new ideas, but because they named something I'd been practising without fully articulating — and reframed it in a way that will stick.

1. Design products and materials that communicate for you

Young's first principle: the best products and materials communicate their own purpose, affordances, and limitations — without requiring the creator to explain them.

This maps directly to Don Norman's concept of affordances in The Design of Everyday Things. A well-designed door handle communicates whether to push or pull. A well-designed course communicates where to start, what to do next, and what success looks like — without a 10-minute orientation video.

As a UX designer, I think about this constantly. When users struggle with an interface, the instinct is often to write better help documentation. But the real question is: why does the interface need documentation at all? If users are confused, the design has failed to communicate.

The same logic applies in learning design. If learners keep asking the same questions about assessment tasks or navigation, those questions are design problems, not learner problems. The material should answer those questions before they're asked.

Practical implication: Before writing instructions, ask whether the design itself can do that work. Annotated examples, visual progress indicators, and clearly sequenced activities can communicate far more than a page of text explaining what to do.

2. See through the eyes of a novice

Young's second insight: experts systematically underestimate how much a novice doesn't know. This is the curse of knowledge — once you know something, it's cognitively difficult to remember not knowing it.

In teaching and learning design, this shows up constantly:

Assuming learners know the jargon you're using
Skipping steps in explanations because they feel obvious to you
Presenting concepts in the order they make sense to an expert, not the order they become accessible to a beginner

The antidote is genuine novice perspective. Not imagining what it's like to be a novice (you can't accurately — your knowledge keeps leaking in), but actually watching novices engage with your material and noting where they get stuck.

This is also why user testing and early-stage feedback are so essential in both UX and learning design. The data from a real novice engaging with your material is worth more than hours of expert review by people who already understand it.

The connection between these two tools

Both of these principles are ultimately about empathy as a design discipline. Not empathy as a feeling, but empathy as a rigorous practice: systematically working to understand the experience of someone who is not you, and using that understanding to make better design decisions.

That's a useful reminder. The best design tools aren't software. They're ways of thinking.