Today George and I were graciously given some lab time with Oberlin students studying their first year of Chinese. We went and threw waves of them at our software to see what they could defeat and what defeated them. The vocabulary lists page defeated them handily and without mercy. It’s just not intuitive! We had just redesigned it with the hopes it would be better, but looks like we have some more work to do. Many users used the select and add buttons to add large swaths of words the slow and inefficient way, rather than using the play/pause/stop buttons above to add from a section. We had our suspicions beforehand but this confirmed our fears.
Nick’s away for the weekend, so George and I have been throwing around ideas to improve the new user experience. The quickstart guide turned out to be a pretty successful way to help new users get their bearings, but not everyone is going to read through that so we can’t count on it. One idea we had was make it so that on the first page new users see, they can set Simplified/Traditional (something else that was a common trip up) and also have them choose one section from one list to start studying from, so they can go straight to the practice page and make more extensive choices later. We’ll also be looking for more ways to improve the design of the vocabulary list page. This will not end until users experience zero frustration and confusion on entering our site! What are your guys’ thoughts on how to improve the transition from new user to Skritter master?
A couple other things. Access to the ChinesePod lists are up and have been up for a few days! It’s not quite finished yet still; only some of the lessons are available at the moment as a teaser, though labels are available. We’ll be tweaking it so that users have access to all lessons, but that’s above 1100 lessons so it’s a lot to sift through so we’ll be adding search functionality. ChinesePod will also be tweaking it at some point so that the lessons fetched through the API only return those that you’ve marked as studying, so that will be the end result. You can access ChinesePod lists through the vocabulary lists page and clicking ChinesePod. I’ll be working on it some more tomorrow so keep checking to see further improvements on that page.
Also, new feature: you can now delete your own data! It’s on the vocabulary options page. Now you don’t have to email me and wait for me to get around to clearing your account for you. Use it wisely though! Are you sure you want to erase all that progress? The choice is yours.