duo-progression-design
Progression Design — Map of Content
Most products teach something, whether or not anyone on the team calls it teaching. Onboarding, tutorials, docs, empty states, the order features unlock, the defaults that hold a novice's hand — all of it is a curriculum, usually one nobody designed. This skill covers the three decisions that make it work: what goes in, in what order, and with how much support — plus the decision teams skip, which is how the support comes off.
Duolingo is the case study because it has published unusually candid accounts of these choices, including the A/B results that cut against its own preferences. Your product is the target. Nothing here is about language learning.
Boundary. This skill owns where a thing sits in the path and what scaffolding surrounds it. Whether a rule gets stated at all, and in what compressed form, belongs to the rules-and-heuristics skill — sequencing and explaining get conflated constantly, so keep them apart.
Scan the descriptions and follow only the [[wikilinks]] you need.
What goes in, and in what order
- [[references/sequence-by-task-not-by-taxonomy]] — the expert's structural order is the wrong first order; teach each primitive at the moment a real task needs it.
- [[references/rank-what-you-teach-by-cost-of-getting-it-wrong]] — sort by consequence, not completeness, and publish the list of errors that are safe to keep.
- [[references/sequence-by-frequency-and-declare-the-tail-optional]] — derive the head from a real corpus, then tell users out loud that the tail is optional.
- [[references/borrow-an-external-standard-as-the-spine]] — invented levels are unfalsifiable; a borrowed standard gives you a bar you cannot quietly move.
- [[references/front-load-the-context-a-later-rule-will-need]] — plant cheap material early so a hard concept can be induced from examples rather than asserted.