Phase 02: Specify

2.0 Overview

The Specify phase transforms your understanding into a detailed exercise blueprint. The purpose is to plan thoroughly before building, reducing the risk of creating content that doesn't work together. We'll guide you through the specification process and show you what's possible in the platform. This phase ensures you have a complete design before investing resources in content creation.

What happens in this phase:

See complete example first – Start by examining an exercise specification to understand what you're building toward.
Understand milestone logic – Learn how the platform connects everything together and enables your exercise to respond to trainee actions.
Explore platform features – Discover what you can use: inject types, tools, channels, overlays, and conditional logic.
Learn the specification process – Follow the methodology to create your own exercise specification.
Enhance the experience – Apply techniques to make your exercise more engaging: storytelling, intro, outro, etc.

Where are we in the INJECT process?

Relation to the Phase 03: Prepare?

If you look closely at the INJECT Process diagram, you will notice a visualized relationship between the Specify and Prepare phases.

Our experience is that when you have a solid specification, exercise preparation becomes much simpler. However, you may also realize during Preparation that something logical conceptually doesn't work as well in implementation. For us, this typically means discovering we've used too many of the same inject options in a row, which can be annoying for trainees.

Therefore, you may change your entire specification based on realizations during preparation. This is completely natural and part of the process.

Can we skip this phase?

We advise not to. Creating content without a clear specification leads to wasted effort, inconsistent exercises, and poor learning outcomes. Specification is where you make essential design decisions. Changing your mind during content creation is ineffective—a few hours planning now saves days of rework later.

If you're new to INJECT: Work through this phase completely. The examples and feature catalog will help you understand what's possible.
If you're experienced: You might move faster or even alter the process to suit your needs.

Start now

Our recommendation is not to read linearly from start to finish. Instead, start with examples, understand milestone logic as the key concept, get to know the platform features, and then move on to specifying objectives, activities, and injects.

Note

We use several terms in the INJECT process that may be unfamiliar, but you can always find their definitions in our glossary.