Outline goalz

The point of having an outline in the app is two fold:

• Encourage people to go into recording with some sort of plan
• Help them navigate editing

There is a third benefit that could be accomplished other ways which is it creates a built in label for the sections which help people listening to jump to what interests them and quickly get a rundown of what is going on in the episode.

The biggest difficulty with the “plan” point is really all that I think is important is that there is a plan and not really how detailed it is. Also the “record everything edit later” style of audio is so powerful because often the good parts of a conversation happen serendipitously. So its hard to both encourage people to have some sort of a plan and also let that plan evolve a bit while recording.

The outline is kind of less about a linear structure and more of a talking points though. I kind of assume there will be entire sections people throw out or skip for example. Maybe rather than outline Talking Points is a better name for the role this plays.

Alternatives

Just for sake of brainstorming alternative solutions to this problem could be:

• Let people mark sections as they record
• Let them fill in later what those sections are

This would help solve the amorphous plan problem because the sections get created literally as you record. I think it is a little too non-prescriptive though and maybe if it gets to this point we should just throw out the pre-planning part entirely. It also means we lose the free benefit of having an outline of the episode already created for publishing before you even start recording.

Another alternative on the very prescriptive side would be you kind of say “ok we are going to talk about dolphins” then record the section on dolphins, then say when you are done and fill in what you are going to talk about next. This is maybe a better compromise to allow the plan to evolve as you record but comes at the cost of really interrupting the momentum. I think that is probably too high a tax to pay for the outlining. Also the talking points should be something you go into recording with mainly.