The frame of Continuous Onboarding

An early attempt at a Table of Contents

The Framing Problem

I was somewhat torn when I started writing the book whether to make its subject Continuous Onboarding or Behavioral Product Strategy. Continuous Onboarding is a better concept handle for people to latch on to and speaks more clearly to a problem. However, the former is a component of the latter, and my worry was that I would need to provide so much context that I would end up talking about BPS anyway.

Ted Nelson

Ngl, I’m a little worried my ideas are too big for one book. Converting a hypertext web to a printable book is hard.

A solid outline, rough around the edges

And reflections on the process of ordering hypertext into longform

I’ve written an early, incomplete outline of my book. I'm still not sure where to best integrate my case studies, and I'm definitely missing a bunch of pages. I also want to add more examples from my observations (as opposed to just my own case studies). However, this feels generally right, so I’ll probably make adjustments to this outline instead of making new ones.

I feel like I'm making progress. When you see green highlighted text, it’s most likely a page you can already read on my website. In that hypertext medium, everything is so densely connected that it becomes shapeless. There are a few starting points, sure, but I can’t count on any two readers having a common experience. This is generally a strength of hypertext; ideally, the reader clicks around, following their curiosity, and quickly ends up on a useful page or fills in whatever knowledge gap they have. With a book, most people will read it beginning to end.

I wonder, if you read the pages in my early outline’s order, would the concepts make sense? Would you come to the same conclusions and theory I’ll present in the book? When you get to Chapter 10, will you have all of the prerequisite knowledge required to understand from Chapters 1-9? Linearization is hard. Especially with the case studies from my own work, as they are generally a synthesis of principles I’ll discuss throughout the book.

Giving the book a frame is incredibly motivating. Looking at this outline proves to myself that I have enough valuable knowledge to say “the world needs this book.” It’s teaching me new things about my beliefs, while making them more digestible to a wider audience.

Soon I’ll put a more concerted effort into placing words into the document. As I’ve been outlining, I’ve been occasionally updating the contents for a page that I know is gonna make it in somewhere, incrementally formalizing it to the point where it’s publishable. I still have a mountain of revisions and rewrites to make it all flow. With hypertext, I often use a link to a page to communicate its ideas concisely, so the pages on my site are short and atomic. As Andy Matuschak points out in “Evergreen Note Titles are like APIs”:

When Evergreen notes are factored and titled well, those titles become an abstraction for the note itself. The entire note’s ideas can then be referenced using that handle (see Concept handles, after Alexander). In fact, this property itself functions as a kind of litmus: as you develops ideas in notes over time and improve the “APIs,” you’ll be able to write individual notes which abstract over increasingly large subtrees.

So if I’m using a page on my site as a section in my book, I’ll need to take its linked pages and expand on them in place. I can only use concept handles as shorthand if I’ve already presented the ideas earlier, or if I plan to give them a section immediately after.

However, I’ve been surprised at how well many of the web pages hold up. To determine whether a series of ideas actually flow together, I’ll read a section of my outline and try to “present” on it. Afterwards, I’ll review what I already have written and find the main points were already there. In a sense, it feels more like I’m composing than writing a book.

Things I’ve been reading:

User Driven UI: An approach to continuous onboarding using a chatbot that progressively gives the user new tools. I’ll probably give my thoughts on this piece its own newsletter at some point. His specific solution aside, I was just thinking about “User directed experience” as a frame for my solution to the hard problem of horizontal product onboarding.

Failure margins and feedback loops: Discusses ways that video games deal with failure states, how “failure” is not necessarily a binary but could have wider margins, and how to help players learn from failure. This will be useful for writing my section on failure state recovery.