Looks like a great tool, not very user-friendly though. Don't you think it would make sense to have a "go" button (or something similar) at the bottom of word lists so you can start practicing the characters on that list right away? Why are you making this so uneccesarily difficult?

They seem to have a lot on their plate at the moment - there's a long list of improvements they're working on.

Given how attentive they're being (see blog posts on user friendliness), I think you could give them some slack!

The suggestion, however phrased, is a fair one though.

Oh, but we wish it were easy.

In my opinion, the one thing that blindsided all three of us the most since we started this company has been user interface friendliness. I didn't think it would be that hard; you just make it and make it work and it'll be fine, but that's not how it ended up. Trying to make something this complicated really gives you an appreciation for companies that do it so seemingly effortlessly, like Apple or Google.

And we take user friendliness very seriously, more and more so as time goes on, because it's pretty much a deal breaker. We spend a large part of our days just responding to emails from people who have difficulty and don't understand our system, which saps our time (and that's our fault not the users; ideally it would be so easy to use no one would have difficulty). And the more difficult our tool is to use, the fewer paying users we'll get. It's a matter of life or death importance to the company. This is one of those parts we just need to get right, no question.

So we've been taking time away from other things and putting it toward just making the site more usable. One of George's main jobs right now is getting testers into our house and sitting them down at our computers and watching where they fail, then writing it all down and sending us the results. He titles the results: "UX Testing: Lessons from the Smackdown" because our testers fail in a whole lot of places. So we all think about how we can make it better, we make changes large and small (which also takes bunches of time), and we bring in another batch and watch things go wrong some more, repeating as necessary. Check out George's recent blog post on the last round of testing we did:

http://blog.skritter.com/2009/11/usability-testing.html

We will keep working on and improving every aspect of the site until it's as clear as can be. A major source of confusion is the list system in general, so all in all that's where we're spending much of our fixing time.

Okay, so regarding your suggestion. We'll try it! One problem George has identified is that people don't tend to correlate the lists they choose with the practice page. Maybe this will help tie the two together. One problem I see though is it might give the impression that you'll be studying the lists you select exclusively, which isn't the case. Maybe a link will be less likely to give that impression...

Well, back to work!

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the attention you're paying to this matter.

What I want to do (and I'm sure I'm not alone here) is to just be able to put in a list of characters, or select one of your lists, and then start practicing them right away without having to go through any extra steps.

If this function is already available, I can't figure out how to do it, but it's clear you guys are addressing the issue at least. I'll stay posted.

Byzanti, I'm sure they appreciate the honest feedback and would prefer at this point that people DID NOT cut them any slack. They're providing a service for paying and potentially paying customers, not hosting a love-in.

I could be wrong though.

Well we've done a number of things to try and make the process as straightforward as possible... Be interesting to know where they failed for you.

First, we made the welcome page specifically to try and get people set up for the practice page as quickly as possible. It's the first page you see when you create a new account. ( www.skritter.com/welcome ) In the welcome page you set your language and style, because those are pretty important, and you set your country/timezone, so we can keep track of your progress according to your timezone, and we have you pick a textbook or an HSK list to study. With all these done, you're all set to practice. Did you leave the welcome page without going through the setup steps? Or did you not pick a textbook? Or were the provided lists not what you were looking for?

Then we also made it so that with custom and textbook lists, you can go to the top level pages and just click the checkbox and it's ready to go, rather than having to click the link to the list and enabling it there.

We also have the practice pretty high up. We want it to be accessible from anywhere on the site, so we put it at the top of the page, when you're logged in. In fact, it's in two high profile places: the list of pages on the upper right part of the page, and the set of account-related tabs (home, practice, progress, vocab, account). It's true, though, from the list pages people tend to want to practice from there, so it could be useful to have another link at the bottom of those pages.

But I'm not sure how else we could shorten the process. You have to choose something to study before you can practice, and to do that you just have to select what sort of thing you want to study (textbooks, custom lists, chinesepod) and then choose one or more of them.

As for user feedback, we get lots of both compliments and honest criticism, the former keeping us motivated and the latter keeping us busy. It's a really great balance, actually, and I don't know if it's normal on the web but it's definitely good, and all in all, not at all coddling.

I guess I wasn't being clear enough in the last post, but I want to be able to select any one of your lists from the "textbooks", etc. and then just click on one of the lists and be able to immediately practice that list. Give me a button where I can click "practice these words" or something like that. I don't understand why that's not an option. When I do click the practice button, it doesn't give me that list I just selected.

I understand how you want everyone to set it up so they have a study plan, track their progress, yada yada, but really, that may work for some people, but not for everyone.

You seem to have this set up with a specific type of learner in mind. The more variety of options for diverse types of learners you give, the more variety of clientele you are going to attract.

This is how to make it work the way you want:

You go to the textbooks page, click the checkbox next to the textbook you want to add from, then go to the practice page. The first thing you should see is the first character from that list. Words will continue to be added from that list while you practice.

However, if I understand correctly, you disagree with the underlying organization of how you study. We do organize things somewhat differently than usual. Normally (as I understand it) what you study is divided into groups, and you study those groups individually. Anki has decks. Smart.fm has lists. And you choose one of those decks or lists and that's all you study; you don't put them together.

Here, we view it all as one big pile of things to study, mixed together. And, by default, nothing leaves this pile; it just gets more and more learned and less and less studied until it's almost never seen.

But how do you add to this pile? You choose sources. You enable a textbook list, and when it's time to learn something new, it takes some more words from whatever sources you have checked, that isn't in your pile of words yet. And when you uncheck a list, the words that have been added from the list don't disappear from your pile. You just have turned off the figurative faucet of that list from adding to your pile of words.

This, we think, is the most effective and most efficient way to learn words. You have one place to go to work on all your words: your practice page. You don't stop studying anything; in order for SRS to be effective, the words you work on have to remain in your studied indefinitely. And everything gets measured as a whole, all together, so you have the progress page to see your overall progress. Also, duplicates don't happen. If a word is in two or more lists you're studying from, it doesn't matter. Our datastore is actually built so it's impossible to have two of the same word.

There are downsides to this. The big one is that it's not the way it normally works, so it's up to us to figure out a way to make it clear to users how our system works and why it doesn't work the way they expect.

Usability is very important, so we're brainstorming about ways to make it better. Changing to a deck system would be pretty involved, since the underlying system is as I've described. It's not something we can change on a dime, so it's not something we can try easily. But if we have to do something like that, we will. But, ideally, without losing the benefits of our current system, and that's a tricky balance and it's not trivial.

@mitch: It sounds like what you're talking about is the "Cram" page rather than the "Practice" page. Maybe you want a link from each textbook/list to "Cram This List"?

James