ACTFL and Thanksgiving

We have returned from our respective homelands and are working again. Nick and I spent the day leading up to Thanksgiving attending the ACTFL convention out in sunny San Diego, CA.


We flew out on Thursday the 18th, all of our connections were on time and the only hitch turned out to be getting the rental car from Budget. Luckily we managed to overcome that problem and we made out with a righteous Suzuki Reno. We set up our booth on the afternoon of the 18th and started conferencing the next day. From Friday to Sunday we talked to more than 150 educators, language lab superstars, and administrators from schools all over the nation. We got many opportunities to brag about Skritter, and about as many opportunities to hear what needs Skritter didn't address. We managed to secure a good spot right across from the Hanban pavilion, and we enjoyed great traffic.

Later today I'll post the pictures of our booth, but in the mean time I wanted to plug our neighbors. We were right next to aha!Chinese and we were really impressed with the founders, Karen Wu and Janet Lin. They make an educational series of textbooks and interactive software for young learners of Chinese. Skritter isn't terribly easy for children to use, but aha!Chinese is, so if you are looking for materials to help a young person learn the language, we definitely recommend taking a look at what they have created. We will be adding them to our links page in the next few days. I first have to dig out of my email backlog!

Japanese: Nakama 1 and 2

Just finished and uploaded two more Japanese textbooks: Nakama 1 and 2. Even if you're not using these textbooks, you might find these lists useful, particularly in the second book. For example, the vocabulary in the second chapter has a lot of words on travel, and the third chapter consists mostly of food and kitchen terms. Remember, though, you won't be able to add a lot of this vocabulary to your studies unless you have it add Kanji for all words (in language settings under the account page), or until we add reading and definition practice.

Next to work on in no particular order: Yookoso!, Minna No Nihongo, Progressing from Intermediate to Advanced, and the JLPT lists.

By the way, as I've been building these lists, I've been tweaking the way words are parsed. Adding words from Japanese lists should be a lot smoother now since I've made all these changes. I've got some ideas on how to make the list editing process much smoother and easier, though, so it will only get better! Lists are going to be becoming more and more important, so it's vital for editing them to be as fluid and intuitive as possible. So many plans, so little time...

Help Overlays

I just uploaded a new help system we're going to try; an overlay system. In pages that have it set up, there's a blue help button in the upper right corner of the page (except on the practice page, where it's on the bottom right). Click it and parts of the page will highlight. Hover over those parts to read about them, and click anywhere to close the overlay.

We're not sure if we're going to keep this, so it's not fully fleshed out; it's more of an outline of what we're thinking it will look like. For now we'd like you to give it a try and let us know if this is something you find helpful. We figured for learning about specific parts of the site, it would be easier to have informative text on the page itself, rather than nested deep in a user's guide where it's detached from the material it's referring to. If you guys like it, we'll expand on the text and put overlays throughout the site. If you don't... well we'll think of something else to try!

Assuming the overlay is kept or something similar is made, the userguide will be trimmed down and reoriented to providing overviews, rather than specific details which the overlays will handle. Things like how managing your vocab works or how to get the most out of practicing or how Skritter can be used effectively as a teaching tool.

This is just one more experiment to try and make Skritter easier to use. Let us know if it helps!

Returning to the ACTFL

Last year we attended the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in Orlando Florida. It was a harrowing experience. We learned of the conference approximately 2 weeks before it occurred. One of our teachers told us that she was going and it would be a good venue at which to show Skritter. We did a little research and realized that not only did the ACTFL sound like a great opportunity for us, the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) also holds their annual meeting jointly. Double win!

We drove all the way from Cleveland to Orlando in one go, all three of us crammed into Scott's tiny little Toyota Matrix. It was magical, and rather smelly. But we made it. We met John Pasden, he blogged about us, and the rest is history.

This year, we are returning to the conference, which is being held in San Diego this time around. Scott opted to man the base while Nick and I attend. So bright and early tomorrow morning Nick and I leave on a highly upgraded mode of transit: a plane! (For the record, we did briefly consider driving, but it was ruled impractical, despite the fact that it had serious roadtrip potential.) Our plane is set to arrive tomorrow afternoon Pacific time. After landing we will setup the booth and await the beginning of the conference on Friday morning.

We suspect that conference attendance will be down this year due to economic woes, but we have high hopes that it will be just as great as last year, even though there isn't another John Pasden to meet. We'll do at least one blog from the conference to keep everyone up to date.

Apart from it being a great a place to show off Skritter, Nick and I were pleased to note how nice San Diego looks relative to Cleveland this time of year. To illustrate the difference, I did a quick (but highly scientific) study. I typed "Cleveland Conference Center" into Google, chose the first result on the map, and took a screen capture of whatever Google Street View gave me (I didn't adjust the view to focus on the actual convention center, which obviously increases the academic rigor of the results). Here's the result:


I did the same thing for the San Diego Convention Center and here's what I saw:



San Diego here we come!

Tobira; Japanese Skritter is on the up and up

Been a while since I blogged. That's because I've been working in the shadows of my cofounders for the past while, either implementing the site tweaks George fabricated with his UX testing, or making the html/javascript front end for Nick's new practice page. But now it's time for me to focus on my own current raison d'être: Japanese.

To start off, I just finished making and uploading the long awaited Tobira textbook list, so all you Oberlin third year Japanese students can get studying your latest kanji. With that one out of the way, JLPT is next on the agenda, mixed in with getting stuff done to help Nick get the new practice page completed and doing all sorts of Japanese stuff.

Japanese hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention since we launched beta in the summer, because there's a heck of a lot of competition with all the feature building, site tweaking and bug fixing we have to do. I'm now buckling down and getting everything done that needs to get done for the upcoming full launch of Japanese; gotta have a full product for that! Among the things I want to get done between then and now: more vocab lists, fully functional features (reminders, cram mode), stroke order and character tweaks, and Japanese versions of Chinese specific pages (stroke order page). And generally make sure Japanese has everything Chinese has, except for tone practice.

Also, we need that reading and definition practice. I've noticed in the beginner/intermediate levels at least, kanji learning is pushed back pretty hard, and so reading and definitions have that much more focus and importance. So we need to have that before full launch as well. I'm so looking forward to that; I even wrote the pseudo-code for converting romaji to kana so that readings can be inputted, even though it's probably going to be weeks/months before Nick can hook it in. When it's ready, I will never forget a word again, or at least, there will be a less than 5% chance I won't be able to recall it at any given time.

Nick says he's optimizing like bananas. I guess bananas are fairly optimized.

New Practice for Japanese, Too

The new version of the practice page that's in testing will now work for Japanese, as far as we know. Give it a try and let us know what's great and what's whack. Getting closer to stability on the new page, but there are still a few batches of bugs to go before we switch over.

We've recently fixed much of the speed issues, so it should be at least as fast as the old practice page. We know it's still not cheetah for most people, especially with older computers, netbooks, and Internet Explorer, so we'll continue to work on it. Do let us know your experiences with the speed and which parts are still slow.

Scott's cranking out some more Japanese textbooks, Tobira being first in line. JLPT lists are coming soon, as well.

Usability Testing

I'm sure that some people have had troubles navigating the site. You might even have had problems doing something that seemed like it should be a really simple task. In some rare cases, users might even have been a little frustrated with our placement of buttons, lack of documentation, and inconsistent use of design elements. You get extra points if you read the preceding paragraph and understood I'm being pretty sarcastic. In truth, we've known for a long time that the usability of the site is pretty bad and it's a big problem. We want the site to grow and prosper, but it's hard for users to get really hyped about Skritter if they get to the practice page and can't figure out what they are supposed to be doing.

That's why we've been spending a considerable amount of time and energy doing 1 on 1 usability testing with students and members of the community around Oberlin. We got the idea after reading Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and it was good that we started now before we added too many more features. The results of our tests are truly frightening. Before I get into some of the lessons, here's a comic I'm sure many of you have seen, but sums up our design process pretty well:


We have tested the site two times so far and will continue to do so. The first group of 8 found so many problems that we waited five weeks fixing things up, and then tested again with another 5 people to see if we could complete a full session without getting derailed a distracting number of times. We used primarily college students, since they don't require $50 to hire them for an hour and we don't know as many "real" adults. Here are some of the stats we found interesting:

Login Woes

12 of our 13 testers tried signing up using the returning user sign in rather than the "Create a New Account box" on the login screen. The 13 had to re-type their account info.


In retrospect, this design should have very obviously been a bad idea. We thought: what do user do most of the time? Login, not sign up! We're helping users!

But at the same time, we are forcing the vast majority of new users to type their information twice, which drastically increases the time it takes to sign up, which is obviously the most vulnerable part of our site. Our plan is to split the login and sign up pages so that we can include testimonials for people to look at while they're considering whether to sign up, like so:



Branding Woes


Only 1 of our 13 testers understood that the little fuzzball in the top left was our mascot. Several people liked it, several didn't, which is consistent with such a small sample.


Several users mentioned that if we had made the mascot more pervasive, ie, it appeared on more pages and seemed more integrated with the UI overall, they would have eventually assumed it was an intentional branding message. As it stands now, most people said they either liked or disliked "whatever those puffballs are." That needs some serious work.


Can you pay for Skritter?

We'd like you to help support our endeavor, here, try Skritter for two weeks free! You like it? Great, why don't you pay? Ooops, couldn't find anywhere to pay? Too bad. Only 6 of our 13 testers were able to find the billing page on their first attempt. You could have paid us in two spots on the site:


Great, nobody can see those, and our top nav has dropdowns on some items and not others, so we changed it so that the "billing" link was a little more visible on the home page, like so:


We also added a not-so-subtle highlight to the account page:


To make it effective, we're going to have to continue iterating until our success rate increases, but hopefully we're moving in the right direction.


Let's Make a Movie

By the time the second group came to visit our site, we had constructed a shiny new "lean more" page, decked out with everything anyone would need to know about Skritter. We even had a video that we made in the style of FogBugz. We opted for a non-standard flash UI since we figured our app was flash heavy and it would look bad for us to simply use a Youtube embed. Here's a picture of what we ended up using:


We learned several things from our experiment. First, we aren't FogBugz, and we misread the context of their video. The demo of version 6's features isn't accessible via their homepage, and for good reason: it's long, and only dedicated folks will want to watch a 12+ minute demo. We thought, "Ah, but we'll just shorten ours to 4 minutes and the dedicated will love it!" Actually, nobody loved it, because nobody in our testing groups watched it. I take that back, there was actually one tester who watched it . . . for about 8 seconds. Lesson: such a video should not be placed front and center when trying to convert traffic.

Second, we learned that despite a more sleek interface, people didn't quickly understand it was even a video. Several recommended using a standard Youtube embed because it would be easily recognizable as a video, and it displays the run time up front! Okay, okay. We thought our little snarky tooltip would handle that, but apparently not.

Closing Thoughts

We aren't done with group two yet, we want to have several more people check it out before we regroup again and make changes, but so far we've been able to make a lot of really needed usability tweaks. The ones included above are just the tip of the iceberg, there were tons of process-oriented problems that would have been time-consuming to explain with screenshots that we discovered were causing people anguish. We plan to keep testing regularly, as per Steve Krug's recommendation until the site becomes easy to use and intuitive.

Thanks to everyone for putting up with the problems. We look forward to making everything a lot easier to use.

Downtime tonight

Server's undergoing maintenance tonight (Tuesday) at 8:00 PM EST. It'll last for up to an hour. You might be able to get to a few pages, but for the most part Skritter will be down. If you do get the practicing itch during that hour, though, I'd suggest checking out something from the list of Chinese radio and other media resources our users put together in this forum thread.

Or you can go check out ChineseTeachers.com, a friend site of ours. They're running a promotion for November where you can get free lessons with Annie, one of their teachers. So if you're interested in one-on-one lessons, check 'em out and let them (and us) know what you think.

We're hard at work tidying the new version of the practice page this week. Even after the bugs are fixed, there's a bunch of optimization needed before it's fast enough to put live, but if you don't mind some bugginess you can use it for Chinese now.

Scott and George have also been making dozens of tweaks to the vocabulary pages, making them easier to use. That'll also continue this week. Then we'll do another round of usability testing and see how well we did.