Of all the improvements and new features I could think of, here is what I think important, more or less in order of priority. I know they all have been mentioned before, I just wanted to give you my idea of importance:

- of the UTMOST importance for me personally: a way to add personal comments to characters and words. This could be mnemonics, example sentences, whatever, only available for the user who writes it. Should be able to do this from the practice page AND while making custom lists (maybe other places like vocab lists etc., I don't really go there often so I don't know).

- Especially in regards to new users: improve the site layout. Less clicking and more straightforward structure of the site. I still very often get lost.

- having different buttons for the 1-4 'know-level' and the tones, I often make mistakes because of this.

- Very important new feature, but I think improvement of existing features and layout is more urgent: pinyin and definition practice, which I just call "reading practice" or "recognition practice"

- the help page could do with some iprovement. Are you open for user feedback on this, for example if i think i can write something better from a user point of view, could I send it to you? Maybe even a wiki-style thing?

- practice page layout: I would like to again be able to see the progress and play/pause buttons of the lists. Also would like to see the character info (magnifying glass) to be visible without clicking. You might say clutter, I say the page is so empty, it makes me lonely. The less clicking I have to do the better and I looooove information. If the information of the previous characters of a word remain visible until the word is finished and I can see the list the word is added from, that's enough. And a small icon with one click access to the dictionary. The only thing I worry about is performance. Too much info will maybe slow the pageloads? And you just had the practice page layout, so this might be a little late, but I just wanna mention it anyway.


Also important though: what not to change! I have always felt at home at this site, with great looks, great content (awesome product) and excellent support and feedback from the makers. It's the only site I have ever payed for. That's why I put the reading practice feature so low in the list, because I hope you can keep the present feel of the site, while adding new features. Going too fast might be overkill. There is enough to learn anyway and I trust you will give us more, more than soon enough.

Well, just my humble opinion.

have a nice day

Steven

I second the first request about adding comments/definitions to characters, really crucial for me as well.

And even more now - after the change of layout for practicing I can't use Skritter anymore since I'm doing Heisig and need to practice recalling from those keywords. When the section was given I could sort it out but now it has become impossible to know which character is requested.

did the previous practice page have a feature that the new one does not have anymore? I think I don't understand what you mean?

The new practice screen is great. Now that it shows the inline definitions and lets you add component words, pinyin and definition practice is my #1 request. Close behind that is component breakdown, so you can see the components of each word and add them to your queue if you like.

As for "improve the site layout" and "less clicking", they have been trying quite hard to make the site more intuitive for new users. Did you have some specific layout suggestions? I would imagine that the more specific you can be, the more it would help the developers understand what you want.

James

- of the UTMOST importance for me personally: a way to add personal comments to characters and words.

YES YES YES

Yes, in the prev version the practice page showed the section that the character was added from. I made a plugin in Firefox to used that info together with the pinyin clicked on to look up the Heisig keyword.

But that's history now! This afternoon I looked into Google Chrome and it was very easy to program a plugin that sniffs up the character asked for and injects code into the page, that displays the exact Heisig keyword. This function could also be used for building your own database with personal comments and keywords etcetc.

If anyone is interested and it's not disallowed by the Skritter staff I can post the source code here and instructions how to set up Chrome.

Yay, I'm a happy Skritter again! :)

@jww1066:
i know they are working on the layout. I also know that it must be very hard. One thing would be that you can access all the links in one place, now some of them are on top, some at the bottom and some parts of the site you can only access if you first go to another part of the site.

One example is the custom list thing. To succesfully make a new list you have to enter the words （obviously） and then click three times: validate words, add words and save. I didn't quite understand this at first and lost my list two times because of this.

From this page I can only go to practice, blog and logout. Okay, I'm in the forum, but if I want to have a quick look at some thing or another it's at least two clicks away. I guess it's a question of keeping it simple and less cluttered versus having more ways to go wherever you are.

Some things I　only find out about because i see it mentioned in the forum or something, or because I accidentily click somewhere. Of course it takes the user to explore and stuff, but it shows that some things are not quite clear.

Like I said, don't change to change, it's already an awesome site and i like simple things. However I find it hard to navigate and although I don't always know what the exact cause is, I wanted to share my experiences with the makers and other users. But you might be right that I　should have been more specific.

have a nice day

Steven

The mnemonics/notes area is one of the next big projects on the list, but we're not working on it for a while; there's a lot of stuff to fix first.

Site layout: yup, we'll work on that. You can go to the home page by clicking the logo, but it's not too clear. Maybe the "home" text underneath it needs to look like a hyperlink. As you find specific things that you want to do that weren't easy or quick, let us know and we'll think about how to improve them.

Custom lists are slated to get a lot better and to replace the backend stuff for cram lists and the queue. That's one of the other big projects that's coming up soon.

I tried a couple quick tweaks to the grade buttons to make them look different from the tone buttons, but I was unsuccessful. I did make one small change. Maybe later we'll design a much better look for them.

I put up definition/recognition practice last night. You can enable it from the practice settings or from the language options. It's still super alpha and it won't affect anything except new words that you add, but have a try and give lots of feedback! Basic reading practice will be on the way once we get definition practice humming along.

Help page is being retired, overlay help system is (possibly) replacing it. We'd welcome suggestions on the overlays from the user perspective, as they don't have too much in them now. Send George an email and he'll facilitate.

We won't have the active lists' progress and play/pause status visible all the time; I think we're decided on leaving it inside its menu. We will have a list's progress bar and status show briefly in the Flash when a word is added, but I haven't finished that yet. Would that suffice?

Don't think we agree about the info vs. clutter thing on the new page, but the list a word is added from may come out of the lookup box. We will be running a poll soon now that we've switched over and fixed its display.

PlutonB: I'd love to see what you did for the Chrome plugin. Go ahead and make a new forum thread for it.