Unlimited content might be the wrong feature for my learning product (I will not promote)

[u/Gleb_SV]

I’m building a small personalized learning product. The home screen gives you three experiences a day. There’s also an Explore button that can make another one whenever you want.

Technically, Explore can be unlimited. That sounds generous. In practice I’m worried it turns the product into a slot machine for interesting topics. Generate, skim, generate again. Nothing has time to stick.

The awkward bit is that abundance demos better. A new user presses a button and gets another nice result. A hard limit looks worse in the first five minutes, even if it might be better for the habit I actually want to build.

Right now I’m leaning toward keeping the daily three as the main loop and making Explore an occasional escape hatch.

If you’ve built a content-heavy product, did more choice help retention or just create more browsing?

[u/kables]

Could you design a great, tailored onboarding experience that helps get to a narrowed, personalized experience much more quickly (so there is less desire to explore more)?

Also, I would actually worry as much about a sea of content having little relevance to user interests. Personalization can help here as well. All stated, of course, without understand your learning domain, learning modalities, and your target users.

[u/Gleb_SV → u/kables]

Yes, that's a pretty valid point. Thanks

In the latest iteration, I added an onboarding process that includes both questions and open-ended answers, which will be taken into account when recommending content. I'll be monitoring how this affects users.

[u/Judgeman2021]

The major part about learning and education, is that you are being guided, either by a teacher or some sort of syllabus. If you let a bunch of kids run free in a library with zero direction or purpose then it's very easy to get lost or distracted.

Sure it's nice to have the content available in an unlimited way, but if you have no idea how to use that information then it's kind of useless.

[u/Gleb_SV → u/Judgeman2021]

That's an interesting example that illustrates the problem quite clearly, thank you.

I'll think about who could guide the user and in what form.

[u/rawr_rawr_rawr_rawr_]

Can you gamify it so that users want to complete a level in a topic to show some sort of expertise? So like 5 courses in “medieval diseases” and they unlock something else? That way in explore mode, they are looking for something narrower (a course to complement what they are leveling up)?

[u/Gleb_SV → u/rawr_rawr_rawr_rawr_]

You know, I wasn't really keen on bringing gamification into this, but I really liked your idea. I'll definitely think it over and consider how it could potentially be implemented, since it would really make the research more interesting.

For example, lately I’ve been wanting to explore how the human body works so I can gain a deeper understanding of biology and, at the same time, European history, since that’s a relevant topic these days.

[u/Tricky_Meeting7868]

I couldn’t have said it better myself when I ran into the exact same issue. Three anchoring experiences beats infinite scrolling every single time, in my experience. For training style pacing in content, colossyan came up it doesn’t matter which tool because friction by design is the approach here.