Turning a 40-page course reader into something navigable
A reading companion that maps dependencies between concepts, so you can see what a chapter assumes you already know before it assumes it.
The problem
Dense technical material is usually written in the order the author understands it, not the order a reader can absorb it. The prerequisites are real but invisible, so students hit a wall three pages in and assume the fault is theirs.
The approach
I modelled the reader as a dependency graph of concepts rather than a linear sequence of pages. The interface then does one thing well: before each section, it tells you exactly which earlier ideas it leans on, and lets you jump back without losing your place.
What I learned
The graph was the easy part. Getting the visual weight right — making prerequisites feel like a helpful aside rather than a wall of warnings — took more iterations than the entire data model did.