Structure Your Content for myTrailhead

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the difference between trails, modules, and units.
Create guidelines for your trails, modules, and units.

How myTrailhead Is Structured

Now it’s time to stop talking about ice cream and start making it. Let’s begin by walking through how myTrailhead is structured.

Trails	Modules	Units
Trails contain modules. Trails are a guided path.	Modules contain units.	Units contain content. At the bottom of each unit, there's a quiz.

How Many of Each?

It’s important that you formalize guidelines for your trails, modules, and units so that your myTrailhead experience is consistent. When you give writers some standards to work with, it’s easier to keep everyone on the same page.

Here are the guidelines we developed at Salesforce for our own Trailhead writers.

Content Type	Minimum	Maximum
Trails Modules Units Learning Objectives	2 modules per trail 2 units per module 500 words per unit 2 learning objectives per unit	7 modules per trail 5 units per module 1,500 words per unit 5 learning objectives per unit

As for the content inside your units, keep these tips in mind.

Write clear, scannable headings.
Keep paragraphs short.

Clear, concise headings help your learners see the structure of your content at a glance, and short paragraphs are friendlier and more approachable than long blocks of dense text.

Trail, Module, or Unit?

Great question. On myTrailhead, each module covers a single, self-contained learning topic. For example, you might have a module to introduce employees to your company’s corporate volunteering program.

Inside the module are units. Each unit covers a subtopic or two. In your corporate volunteering module, for example, you might have a unit that describes the history and structure of the program, a unit that explains how to get involved, and a unit that shows learners how to log their volunteer hours in your company’s volunteer time off (VTO) app.

When you have a group of modules on related topics, and you want learners to work through them in a particular order, you put the modules together to create a trail.

Let’s walk through an example.

We've got a trail on Trailhead that gives salespeople advice on building a sales career. A screenshot of the Build Your Sales Career trail with its modules, showing the unit topics for the first module

To succeed in your sales career, you have to be as productive as possible. But even before you try to boost your productivity, you have to build your prospect base.

That's why the first module in the trail teaches the basics of prospecting, covering subtopics like why prospecting is important, how to develop a contact strategy, and when to get in touch with your contacts. Only later in the trail (in the third module, to be precise) do you learn productivity-enhancing tips.

Now you know how myTrailhead is structured. Are you ready to start writing?

Resources