Build log/#005/Product
We deleted the video player
It worked. It was nice. It was also the reason lessons kept getting longer.
We built a video player early because every learning platform has one. Ours was good: chapter markers, a transcript, the speed control everyone immediately sets to 1.5×.
Then we watched ourselves use it. Every time a lesson had a video slot, the lesson grew to fill it. A concept that needed forty words got four minutes, because four minutes felt like a proper lesson and forty words felt like we hadn’t tried.
That’s backwards. The measure of a lesson isn’t how long it took us to make. So the player is gone. There will still be short clips where seeing something genuinely helps — a debugger stepping through, a layout reflowing — but they have to earn the space, and none of them will be four minutes.
The immediate effect: lesson one went from six minutes of watching to about ninety seconds of reading and a text box you type into. It’s better. It’s also slightly frightening how much smaller the whole course got.