Recently we asked people to answer a four-question short answer user survey. We have now had time to look through the results and wanted to share some of them with the community. To enliven the review, Nick and I took the survey ourselves prior to looking at any of the answers. This way we figured we could compare how we thought about Skritter to how our dedicated users thought about our creation. So, below you’ll find a short summary of the results and comparison to what we internally think. For the sake of brevity, I’ve only outlined the first three questions.
1) How would you describe Skritter to a friend?
I described Skritter with an elevator pitch (I guess I am the businesser though). Nick, and the majority of users chose to describe Skritter with superlatives. The most common adjectives used by users to describe us were “great,” “best,” “excellent,” and “efficient.” In contrast, Nick opted for “awesome” and “fun.” Among some of our favorite descriptions of Skritter: “the bees knees, the dog’s danglies,” and “a superlative laden Chinese writing roller coaster.”
Overall, we were surprised that only 50% of people mentioned writing in their descriptions of Skritter and the word flashcard kept coming up. Here’s my favorite response: “take flashcard practice, but instead of waving your finger in the air you’re actually writing it.”
2) Why do you use Skritter? (How does it help YOU?)
Most people said they used Skritter to learn characters. The 3 most common verbs mentioned were “writing,” “improve,” and “learn.” Quite a few people mentioned that they started using Skritter to learn writing only and then began to see improvements in general vocabulary retention, which is great news for us! Nick said he uses Skritter because it allows him to be “lazy” about his character learning and still improve like crazy. Nice job setting an example there Nick!
3) What would persuade you to use Skritter more often?
We got all sorts of answers to this one, but the clear winners were mobile apps and leaderboards/rewards systems. This is an interesting result since Nick and I both voted for a rewards system. iPhone/iPad/Android apps have long been requested Skritter features and we are continuing to research the feasibility of such an app. The Android version is live, and Apple recently announced that cross compiled flash apps will be accepted to the app store, so we are interested.
Perhaps the funniest entry we got for this one was “less alcohol.”
Overall we learned a lot from the survey and wanted to thank everyone who filled it out for giving us their time. We will be able to use the results to make the site more in line with what you want.