One participant, one day
Page 3 of 5. About four minutes.
The one idea
Nothing is waiting on a screen for Ana to arrive. Her home screen is built on her phone, in the moment she opens the app, out of what she has been given.
Tuesday morning
07:12, before she touches anything. Three deliveries sit on her account: the check-in, a breathing practice, a reading card. A fourth was added by her coach yesterday. None of them is on a screen. They are records.
07:13, she opens the app. The phone asks the server what she has, gets the answer, and assembles the screen locally. Then it works out, for today, which of those deliveries is due.
07:14, what she sees. A heading, "Today", and four items under it.
| What she sees | What it is |
|---|---|
| The heading | A surface. It sets the look and the order, and holds no content. |
| The four items | Four deliveries. One each, from different places: a schedule, a rule that fired, a timed card, her coach. |
| A Start button on one | The sequence behind it has a start button label. The other three show a ring instead. |
07:15, she taps. The check-in opens: five questions on one screen. Those five are atoms, and together they are a sequence. Ana never sees either word.
07:18, she submits. Three things happen at once.
- Her answers are written to her own phone first, then sent up.
- A score is worked out on the phone, if the sequence was authored with scoring.
- The item stays on screen with a tick, because this delivery is persistent.
The app works offline. Ana's screen was assembled on her phone, her answers were written there before anything was sent, and her score was worked out there. So a participant with no signal can still open the app, see what they have and answer it, and what they wrote goes up the next time the phone has a connection.
07:18, one second later. Her answer reaches the journey, which reads it and moves her one step. That step adds tomorrow's card. One answer moves the journey one step, which is worth holding on to while you are laying out the steps.
Wednesday, 07:20. The check-in is back, clean. Yesterday's tick is still on yesterday. Answering one day never touches another.
What did what
| Building block | What it did on Tuesday |
|---|---|
| journey | Made the deliveries, read her answer, moved her on |
| delivery | Put one sequence on her screen, on its own schedule |
| sequence | Held the five questions |
| atom | Was each of the five |
| surface | Decided the heading, the look and the order |
What you can now do
Look at anybody's home screen and say which of the five put each thing there. That is the question that sends you to the right page for the rest of this site.
Next
Who does what. You know what the platform does. The next page is who does which part of the work, and why the line falls where it does.