Several weeks ago we asked people to take a Skritter user survey. In it, we asked all sorts of questions about how you use Skritter, what you want out of similar educational services, what news outlets you pay attention to, what you thought needed improving. The survey was a pretty big success! We had banked on only a few dozen people answering it, but at this time 169 of you filled it out, giving us 4225 answers to the survey’s 25 questions. For those of you that filled it out, thank you very much, we really appreciate you taking the time to help us make the site better.
And without further ado, we’d like to share 3 interesting insights we gained from the survey:
Getting Started Isn’t as Hard as We Thought
For a long time, we’ve been concentrating hard on making it easier to start using Skritter. For those of you who have been around the site for a while (all 50% of you), you might remember how different things used to be. For instance, do you remember when we would drop you right on the practice page after logging in? Or perhaps when getting to the different vocabulary sources involved hovering over a non-clickable-looking menu and following a drop down to “lists” from which point you still had to find different vocabulary sources?
Well, apparently we have been making good progress on this front because 93.3% of you said that it was either “Sorta Easy” (31.5%) or “Very Easy” (61.8%) to get started using the site.
We can’t help but think that perhaps your experiences to date may have colored those glowing reviews of our ease of use since we still see so many glaring problems, but it certainly feels good to know that we’re making progress!
You Guys Study Like Crazy
We have always encouraged people to study for short regular intervals to maximize character retention, but honestly, we didn’t think so many people were actually doing it. Results from the survey indicated that 82.9% of you are either practicing 3-7 (57.1%) or 7+ (25.8%) times a week.
That kind of regularity is hugely important to learning efficacy and we applaud everyone that’s being so diligent. To give you a point of reference, here at SkritterHQ Nick studies every day for exactly 20 minutes, I study about 5 days a week for 10 minutes a day, and Scott tries but falls squarely into the 1-3 times a week category.
Supporting Different Curricula is Important to You
We’re probably preaching to the choir, but we strongly believe that educational tools should support different modes of study across different bodies of content. That’s why we support so many lists, allow you to create your own, and have tie-ins to other sites (like ChinesePod).
The results pointed to the fact that you like the fact that Skritter is an open, platform agnostic tool. Of the people that answered the survey, only 8% of you thought supporting different curricula was unimportant. We have a short list of textbooks you guys want updated and the survey results underscore the importance of our approach to vocabulary.
Note on Stats
We do realize that our stats aren’t terribly scientifically correct. We’re pulling data from a self-selected group of learners out of an already small group of Chinese and Japanese language enthusiasts who like learning on the web.
In a perfect world, we’d have polled 5x as many learners at several institutions, some students that aren’t affiliated with institutions, administered an actual Likert scale instead of our modded 3-choice version, removed the anchoring effects of some of the multiple choice answers in favor of free responses, given the survey in paper as well as online form, randomly shuffled the questions to remove any leading effects created by question sequences, and had a professional statistician look over the questions to ensure that we were asking questions in the least biased way.
So, the results certainly aren’t authoritative, but they have been helpful for their intended purpose: giving us a little help figuring out what you say you want, what you say you don’t want, and how we can better attract people to the site.
We want to thank everyone that took the time to fill out the survey. We really appreciate how involved everyone has been and we look forward to using the result to better the site and your user experience.