LULUSKILL ARTICLE
From a club's request to a prompt, a plan and an acceptance sheet
A photography club needs three beginner workshops with 24 seats each. Follow one request all the way through: the decisions, the prompt that was pasted, the one-page plan and the sheet somebody else can run.
This is LuluSkill's own writing. It does not quote, mirror or summarise any third-party Skill, and it recommends none. Reading it builds, publishes and runs nothing: what an AI tool does with your text is for you to check.
What the club asked for, and what it was really asking for
The request arrived as one line in a group chat: "Can we get a sign-up page for the beginner workshops?" Everything below is invented for this article — the club, the people, the numbers and what happened in the end — so that a request can be followed from the first sentence to the sheet somebody runs. It is a teaching example, not a record of a real event.
The club runs three two-hour beginner workshops in one month, 24 seats each, and one volunteer coordinator handles everything. Members are students and working adults who will open the page on a phone, often while walking. The club has no money for this and no wish to start a subscription for a two-week need.
Taken literally, the sentence is enough to start work and not enough to finish it. "A sign-up page" could reasonably turn into a member directory, a calendar, three separate pages, an account system, or a printed list in a shared document. Each of those is a different product, and the coordinator would find out which one they got only after it came back.
The four limits that shaped every answer
In plain words
- No budget at all
- Nothing can be paid for, and nothing new can be subscribed to. This removes a whole class of designs before anyone starts arguing about them.
- One coordinator, part time
- The whole path has to be runnable by one person who is also teaching the workshops, so no step may need two people at the same moment.
- Phones, one thumb
- Every step is done on a small screen with one hand, which is a layout constraint long before it is a feature one.
- A first name and nothing else
- No phone numbers, no addresses, no payment details and no photographs of people. Anything not collected does not have to be protected, corrected or deleted later.
Five decisions, and the reason each one was made
Each entry below was a real fork in the road: the opposite choice was defensible, and someone could have made it. Writing the reason down next to the decision is what makes it possible to change one of them later without reopening all five.
Decision, then why
In plain words
- One page, not three
- A member does exactly one thing here: take a seat. Three pages would each need their own empty, waiting, failed and finished states for no extra benefit, and the coordinator would have three places to look when something goes wrong.
- A typed first name, not an account
- An account means passwords to store, reset and explain to 72 people who will use the page twice. A name typed into a box answers the same question for an event that lasts a month, and it collects less.
- All three sessions on the same page
- Members decide which session suits them by looking at all three at once. Splitting them would force a choice before the comparison could be made.
- A visible seat count
- The most common question the coordinator gets is "is there still space on the second one". A number on the page answers it without anyone writing an email.
- No reminders, no export, no report
- All three were asked for in the first conversation. Each was written into the out-of-scope list instead, because together they would have tripled the amount of work and none of them is needed for the first workshop to happen.
The prompt, written out in full
This is the text the coordinator ended up with, invented for this article and shown whole so it can be compared with the decisions above. It is deliberately short: five short paragraphs, each of which answers one of the five questions, and a closing line that asks for questions instead of guesses.
The prompt, as it was pasted
Example
One page for a photography club's three beginner workshops. Every number, name and rule in it is invented.
- Goal: one page where a member of our photography club can take a seat in one of three beginner workshops, from a phone, in under a minute.
- Who it is for: our members, most of them on a phone. The coordinator who runs the workshops is not the main user — she only needs to see how full each session is.
- What a member does: opens the page, sees the three sessions with their dates, times and remaining seats, types their first name, picks one session, and sees their name on that session. No password and no email address.
- What done looks like: the member sees their name on the session immediately; the coordinator sees each session with the number of names on it and the number of seats left.
- Not in this version: accounts with passwords, reminders by any channel, exporting a list, reports of attendance, payments, and anything that asks for a phone number or an address.
- How we will check it: two members open the page on two phones, one picks the last free seat in a session and the other picks the same session a moment later. The first name must be on the session, the second person must be told the session is full, and the seat count must never go below zero. If anything above is unclear, ask before starting.
Two things make this usable rather than merely detailed. The last paragraph is a check somebody else can run, and the fourth paragraph names what is deliberately absent, so the absence is a decision rather than an oversight.
The one-page first-version plan that followed
The prompt says what the page is for. The plan says what has to exist for it to work at all: which screens, which pieces of information, who may do what, and what happens when the evening goes wrong. It is still one page, and every line of it is still a decision the coordinator could be argued out of.
The plan, in six lines
Example
Written before anything was made, for the invented photography club.
- Screens: one page. It has four states — empty of names, loading while a name is added, failed when the seat could not be taken, and done when the name is on the session.
- Data: each session's date, time and seat count; each sign-up's first name and which session it belongs to. A sign-up is removed together with its session a week after the workshop. No other information is kept.
- Permissions: someone who is not a member sees the three sessions and the seat counts, and can sign up. The coordinator sees the same page plus the full list of names for each session. Nobody can remove another person's sign-up.
- Key flow: a member opens the page, reads the three sessions, types a first name, picks a session, and sees the name on it with the seat count one lower.
- Mistake path: a name left empty shows one sentence asking for a name, and nothing is added. A name typed twice into the same session is shown the line it is already on instead of being added again.
- Failure path: if the last seat was taken a moment earlier, the member is told the session is full, the seat count is refreshed, and nothing is saved. Out of scope: accounts, reminders, exports, reports, payments.
Notice what the failure path decided in advance: a race for the last seat is the one thing about this page that is genuinely hard, and it is cheaper to decide the sentence the loser sees than to discover later that nobody decided it.
The acceptance sheet, written for somebody else to run
The check inside the prompt is one sentence. The sheet below is that sentence unfolded into numbered steps with an expected result for each, so a member of the club who has never seen the plan can follow it and write down what they saw. Every line uses invented data: three names the club made up, and no real member appears anywhere in it.
The sheet, as handed over
Example
Six steps for the invented photography club. The third step is the check the whole prompt was written around.
- Setup: two phones, freshly opened on the page. Test names: Wen, Ade and Lin. Sessions have 24 seats each.
- Step 1: on phone A, look at the page without touching anything. Expect: three sessions, each with a date, a time and the number 24.
- Step 2: type Wen and take a seat in the first session. Expect: Wen appears under that session, and its number is now 23.
- Step 3, the acceptance check: on phone B, have Ade take the last free seat in the second session, then — a moment later, before the page refreshes — have Lin try to take the same seat. Expect: Ade is on the session, Lin is told it is full, and the number never reads below zero.
- Step 4: press the confirm control with the name box empty. Expect: one sentence asking for a name, and no new line on any session.
- Step 5: close both phones completely, then open phone A again. Expect: Wen and Ade are still there, on the same sessions.
- Step 6: write down, for each step, whether it matched. One line per step, no summaries.
Step 3 is hard to arrange on purpose. It is the only step that tests the thing most likely to go wrong, and a sheet that quietly skips it would pass every round while the page kept losing a name under load.
How the club kept the sheet honest
- The member who ran it had not read the plan, so a step that needed explaining was fixed in the sheet rather than explained out loud.
- The sheet was run on a phone, because that is where the members will be, and the club's laptop never entered the room.
- The sheet is kept next to the plan, so the next round of changes is checked against the same six steps rather than a fresh opinion.
Two failures, and the one-line correction for each
The invented result of the first round is below, written the way a note is written during a session: what was done, what was expected, what happened. Both failures are ordinary ones for this kind of page, and neither of them is a reason to abandon the plan — each is a line that was missing from it.
What the first round found
Example
Two notes and one line for what passed, from the invented session.
- Note 1, step 3, blocks the key flow: Ade took the last seat and Lin took it too. Both phones show Lin, and the session now reads one seat over its limit. It happened both times the club tried.
- Note 2, step 5, wrong but has a way around it: after both phones were closed and phone A reopened, Wen's name was gone from the first session even though its seat number had not gone back up.
- Passed: steps 1, 2, 4 and 6. Step 1 was correct on all three phones the club tried, and the empty-name sentence appeared exactly once each time.
Note 2 is the more interesting of the two, because the number and the list disagree. A page that only ever shows one of them would have looked correct while quietly losing a sign-up.
| Failure | The missing line | The correction |
|---|---|---|
| Two people took the last seat | The failure path said what the second person is told, but never that the seat has to be claimed before it is counted. | One added sentence: a seat is claimed first and confirmed second, and a claim that loses is discarded without counting. |
| A name vanished but the count stayed | The data line said when a sign-up is removed, but never said what the seat count is derived from. | One added sentence: the number shown is always counted from the list, never stored on its own. |
Comparison
When this way of working fits, and when it does not
It fits when
- One person can describe the whole path, and the same person will judge whether it worked.
- The need ends — an event, a season, a one-off task — so a small deliberately temporary page is the right size.
- The information involved is thin: names and choices rather than money, health or identity documents.
- Someone who is not the author can run the acceptance sheet, and there is time for exactly one round of fixes.
It does not fit when
- The page has to keep working for years, or has to survive staff changes, because then the plan needs an owner and a maintenance answer this one page has no room for.
- Money, health information or children's data is involved, because those need decisions about retention, access and deletion that a four-line data note cannot carry.
- Two teams have to agree on the outcomes, because a single coordinator's acceptance sheet cannot stand in for an agreement nobody has made yet.
- The task is mostly judgement rather than a path — writing a policy, deciding a price — because then there is no flow to make work end to end.
Your next step
Three things to do with your own idea, in order. None of them needs an account, a tool or a Skill.
- Find the last request you sent to an assistant, and write the five answers beside it before sending anything else.
- Write your acceptance check as one sentence somebody else could run, and name the person who will actually run it.
- Keep the prompt, the one-page plan and the sheet in one place, so the next round edits them instead of starting again.