# The method

Every lesson is built the same way and has to pass the same twelve checks. Published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Take it and use it.

## Seven steps

1. **Start from a moment, not a topic** Not "email management". Somebody sent a thread with forty replies and asked what we decided. Topics are how institutions organise content. Moments are how people search. Test: could you overhear this in a break room?
2. **Name the outcome, then name the exit** One observable thing the reader can do afterwards, written as a verb they perform rather than something they understand. Then, immediately, who should skip it. If half the audience should leave, say so.
3. **Cut to the smallest true thing** If it does not change what the reader does in the next twelve minutes, it is not in this lesson. Then do the whole thing with a stopwatch, at the pace of somebody meeting it for the first time, and publish the number that comes out.
4. **Show, then let them try with the answer visible** Every step says what the reader should see afterwards. That is what stops somebody quietly concluding they have broken something. Then one worked variant with the answer shown, before anything unaided. That guided middle is where most free training has a hole.
5. **Write down what went wrong** Two to four real failures, hit while doing the lesson, and what to do about each. Required, not optional. It is the difference between teaching and documenting.
6. **One real task, today** On the reader's own machine or in their own life, under ten minutes, producing something that did not exist before. Four tests: is it real, is it today, is it one thing, does it make something.
7. **Check it, then leave one way forward** Twelve checks. A published date and a last-checked date. Then exactly one link to the next lesson, not a grid of related content.

## The lesson spine

1. Breadcrumb — track, then path
2. Mono label — lesson number, track, time, last checked
3. Title — the moment
4. Outcome — "After this you will be able to X"
5. Skip this if — honest entry criteria
6. What you need — device, account, licence, cost
7. Retrieval opener — one question about the previous lesson
8. Steps — numbered, each saying what you should see
9. Try this one first — a worked variant with the answer visible
10. If it goes wrong — two to four real failures
11. Do today — one task. The only green block on the page
12. Where else this works — two dissimilar situations
13. Practice card, check block, and exactly one next lesson

## The explainer bar

A lesson has a spine and twelve checks. An [explainer](/explain/) is a different
thing with a different bar, and its bar is enforced by a script rather than by a
person. A page will not publish unless all of this is true.

- Five to ten screens, one idea each. If it needs eleven, it is two pages, or it is a lesson.
- Under 120 words on the whole page. Headings, captions and the footer all count.
- A picture on every screen, drawn as inline SVG from six shapes: a box, a line, an arrow, a square dot, a dashed frame, a label. No photographs, no icons, no stock, no screenshots.
- A written description on every picture, so a screen reader gets the same idea as a sighted reader. Missing one fails the build.
- Brand colours only. Green marks the thing being explained, amber the thing you do.
- No exclamation marks and no banned words, including the phrase "it's easy", which is the whole point of the site.

The script is deliberately blunt. It cannot tell whether a page is any good; it
can only tell whether it broke a rule. A person still reads every one before it
goes up.

## What was deliberately left out

- **Learning styles** No evidence behind them. There will never be a "visual learner" route here.
- **A quiz at the end** A quiz about the lesson measures whether you read the lesson. Around twenty free UK providers end this way. It is the ending this site differentiates against.
- **Completion certificates** They measure attendance. This audience has been measured enough.
- **Video by default** It cannot be skimmed, it needs headphones somebody may not have, and it is wrong the moment a menu moves. Where video helps it sits alongside the text, never instead of it, always with a transcript.
- **Streaks, badges, progress bars, scores** Anything that makes a learner feel measured works against the one rule this site has.
- **Accounts and logins** Not now, not later. Retrieval and spacing are done with prompts instead, which needs no account.