Join us for our first open chat!

Lately we've been itching to communicate with everyone using the site in a more synchronous and immediate way. We've been contemplating putting up a short-response poll but we thought it would be better to try an open chat session first and see how that went. Do you have questions about the site you would like answered? Would you be willing to let us ask you some questions about your experience on Skritter? Do you want to know which Smash Bros Brawl character is our favorite? Show up and find out.

Here are the details: join our chat at http://drop.io/skritter/chat on Saturday (October 31st) 11:00AM - 12:00PM or 4:00PM - 5:00PM EST. We will all three be standing by so you don't have to put up with just me.

We would encourage you to show up and chat a little independent of your user status. For instance, you could show up and tell us why you didn't stick around (which does sort of beg the question, is our blog really that good?), what's holding you back from buying a subscription, or even just what you appreciate about the site. We're looking forward to running this experiment, and we hope to see you there.

Wow, thanks for the feedback!

You've given a lot of feedback over the past three days about the new practice design! It is well appreciated. I'm not sure why, but it seems that Skritter users are uncommonly smart when it comes to this sort of thing--the feedback is great!

We've fixed almost all the bugs you guys found, and made many of the style changes. There's still a lot left to do, but now you can test it in IE 7+, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or on a Mac, and it should work. Here's some things we need more opinions on:

Flash alignment: We moved the Flash writing window from the right to the left. How do you like it? We've heard a few opinions on each side, so we're considering making it a preference if enough people want it.

Zoom: We've got full page zoom working (Ctrl +/-), so please give that a try and let us know whether it works, how you like it, if you'll use it, and if you had previously used 250px canvas size but will now just use page zoom.

Grade buttons: Hit the settings menu on the upper right to try these out. We're very curious to know whether they make sense, so tell us what you expect that they'd do. Also, do they look good? Do they get in the way? Will you use them? Should they automatically go to the next prompt when you click them?

Keyboard shortcuts: Do you use them? Is it clear what the shortcuts are? Are they working on your system?

Tone shortcuts: Currently, pressing 1-4 will grade the current prompt. On tone prompts, however, 1-5 input the tone. Conflict! There's a few different ways we could do it--how do you think it should work? Is it too weird that the keyboard shortcuts change? Do you want to grade yourself more precisely on tones, even though they're so short? Would you want to use other shortcuts for tone number input?

General aesthetics: What looks good? What doesn't? The review/added bars have been mentioned as an eyesore, as well as the tone buttons. What do you think?

Test the Design

Go to http://www.skritter.com/practice_new and check out the new practice page design. Let us know what you think! We've added a lot of stuff, most of which is ready. There are still a lot of bugs, and it's pretty slow until we optimize it. We also haven't yet tested in IE, so it likely won't look right there. And it will definitely break for Japanese.

We're most interested in comments on the design and new features. We'll be debugging it and hooking up a couple other things in the next several days, but what do you think of the big changes we've made?

We'll do a more detailed post later, when we put all of this live. Here's a short list of novelties:
Buttons
- No more ignore or undo buttons (although you can press 'z' for undo still)
- Added back button
- New button icons, bigger buttons
- Buttons are now labeled
1-4 grading
- 1-4 grading is on, with 1 as the old "wrong" and 3 as the old "right"
- There are 1-4 grading buttons available from the settings menu
Menus
- Practice settings now all on practice page menu (buggy on Mac)
- Stroke order animation control
- Active lists control in its own menu
- Comment box lives inside a 'feedback' tab at the lower right
Add word control
- You can set adding of new words to "automatic" or "manual" (like "pause all" for active lists)
- Manual add word button (still buggy)
Audio
- Volume control is a slider instead of a click
- There's a speaker icon to click to play the word, if available (still buggy)
- There are word- and character-level lookup boxes (magnifying glass) for more info, including dictionary lookup from choice of dictionary (trad. chars aren't done)
Prompt
- Flash on the left, prompt on the right
- Fonts and field ordering for the prompts are different
- You can enable tone colors from settings menu
- Character info is hidden to start off
- Prompt time is hidden until the clock is stopped
- The old "blue is wrong for new word" is gone; blue is now the "too easy" color
- Readiness indicators: only one per word, now "studied 36 min ago: still learning" rather than "36 min 999%"
Flash
- Almost all of it is rewritten since you last saw it. Fixed a bunch of bugs, introduced a lot more. It's slow right now until optimized. Good news is that it's almost ready to start letting you practice pinyins and definitions.

Strike of the Toolbar Ninja

Nick and Scott peer-pressured me into posting another time lapse video of my design work. This video just focuses on me laying out and exporting the new practice page toolbar buttons and consists of 1300 still frames taken over 5 hours. Who would have thought that an area of the site only 350x55 pixels in dimension would have taken so long to design!

In other news, Scott and Nick are working around the clock to get the public beta of our new design ready for the masses. It's uncertain whether we'll get it done by the end of the weekend or not, but it's coming soon. We've been so long at this project we've reached a stage of "just get it done," which has motivated us to strip a lot of features from the beta that you'll be seeing shortly. I'll let Nick and Scott discuss this particular topic in more detail in the inevitable blog post on the topic.

A Day in the Life of a Designer

We're still not quite done with the pinyin and definition redesign, but to keep everyone up to date before we release a public beta of our work, I thought I'd share a sort of humorous look at how we designed two measly menus on the practice page.

The following video is made up of 1080 still frames taken over the course of 10 working hours last week using a program called TimeSnapper. I only omitted two things from the video: a Google Wave discussion (it was related to the design, but isn't much fun to watch) and me spending about 15 minutes editing my Winamp playlist (incidentally most of the design work was done to Rammstein's new album). You won't be able to see some of the fine detail due to compression and scaling, but hopefully you can enjoy the frantic pace of it.

As per my last post about this topic, the biggest thing missing from the video is our discussions, deliberations, and general iterative design.

Pinyin and Definition Practice

We haven't been blogging too much lately because we've all three been working hard on the pinyin and definition practice, which promises to be mega sweet. We've spent the last week or so hammering out the design, which has included a big overhaul of the way the practice screen currently works. The process has gone something like this:

Morning:
Nick: "George, are you done with that design yet? Because we need that thing."
George: "I'm working on it."

Afternoon [after about 3 hours of photoshop work]
George: "Okay Nick, what do you think of this?"
Nick: "It's pretty good . . . what do you think of having the pinyin font about 2 points larger, about 10px left, and center aligned? How about if we float these icons right to provide more room, and we change these icons to something more flashy."
George: "More flashy?"
Nick: "Yeah, like put some gradients in there."
George: "Ug."
Nick: "And then I was thinking . . . you know what would be better than this design? If we actually had all of the functionality represented here immediately visible to the user, so have . . . ."

[1 hour later]

Nick: ". . . so yeah, let's get Scott down here to see what he thinks."

Scott: "It's pretty good . . . what do you think of having the pinyin font about 2 points SMALLER, about 10px RIGHT, and LEFT aligned? That would be more simple and easy to understand. How about if we float these icons UP to provide more room, and we change them to something less distracting."
George: "Less distracting?"
Nick: "Yeah, make them plain colors or something."
George: "Ug."
Nick: "And then I was thinking . . . you know what would be better than this design? If we actually had all of the functionality represented here hidden in some submenus to keep the practice page proper more simple . . ."

Okay, so maybe it hasn't been THAT bad, but it's been a little stressful. We've just about cemented the design, and Nick and Scott have already started implementing the stuff that is finished. With any luck we'll be able to get the new features up in the not-too-distant future.

Skritter Agent

"Skritter Agent hounds you, Skritter Agent helps you!" User Faceleg, also known as Michael Robinson, has completed the first version of his Skritter Agent, which is a cross-platform tray app that sits in the background until it's time to remind you to practice on Skritter. It's very lightweight and useful, so give it a shot!

You can tell it to remind you every X minutes after you have built up Y reviews or haven't practiced for Z hours, whichever comes first. To use it, just double click SkritterAgent.jar. I recommend setting it to start up with your computer, so that it's always on to remind you. Don't worry; it'll stay out of your way.

Faceleg says it isn't pretty yet on Mac, but it should work. Let him or me know if you see any problems. Thanks for developing this, Faceleg! I've been able to practice more regularly since I started using it, and regular practice is next to awesomeness.

Remembering the Hanzi

Among other textbook lists, Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1 and Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1 are up and ready for consumption. I've been watching the progress of some Skritter users doing the character-only, composition-ordered Heisig approach, and I am very impressed by how insanely fast they're scribing through the characters. These are currently just the vocab lists; we don't have the headwords in there. But check them out! If you give these lists a try, please let me know how they work for you.

We've also just created a new demo video intended to introduce curious persons to Skritter, which you can see at the new "about" page. What do you think?

Export Feature

Just put the finishing touches on a new feature: vocabulary export. You can now export all the words you are actively studying, or you can export lists. Go to the vocabulary page, where it's listed as a new tool. Or, you can go to any list and you'll be able to export that list under the advanced tab.

I imagine this will cover most peoples' needs. If there's more data people would like to have access to, please let me know. I decided rather than try and cover all cases and make a comprehensive tool for exporting data, I would instead see what exactly people want the data for and then build for just those purposes. Seems like the most efficient way to go about it. But this is all your data so if you want it, it will be provided!

So next on my agenda:

• Some bug fixes.


• Write/add more Japanese lists (working on Tobira now for Oberlin 3rd years)


• Add the ability to delete words from study in the viewer


• Manual add button on the practice page


• User interface tweaks and upgrades

As I'm sure George will blog about in the not too distant future, we're doing some usability testing, pulling people into our house who have never seen the site and having them do basic things. Boy does the interface still need work! Well, rest assured there's still a constant effort going on to make our site easier and easier to use.