He said he just wanted to practice characters and it kept asking him other things. (tone, pinyin, etc.) He didn't know he could choose what parts to study.

He didn't like the skritter character font. He didn't like how it took his strokes and snapped them into place one by one. He wanted to write the whole character first. He didn't know there was a setting (write raw squigs) that allowed him to do this.

He purchased a cheap tablet for use with skritter and it didn't work very well. (I don't know what kind he got, something available here in China.)

I explained to him that there were settings which allowed him to customize skritter to his preferences, and he said he'd give it another try....maybe. Later.

Thought you guys might be interested in his experience.

Nicki, thanks for the feedback, it's quite helpful. I've been telling people that ask to try out the tablets in the electronics markets on the Skritter demo page - some of them are no good (not compatible or just poor quality). I think it would make sense to seek out a particular brand in China that we could recommend (something not too pricey that works great with Skritter).

Others - any recommendations on a decent-priced tablet widely available in China?

For the rest of them, maybe it makes sense to walk through more of the options when people sign up (with a button that says "Skip" for those who don't want to go through a lot of options).

We'll need to think a bit more about how we can make it smoother for users like him and see what we can come up with. Again, thanks for this very useful information!

Maybe when users first sign up, they could see a wizard that walks them through all the options in a friendly way. "What languages do you want to study?" "Do you want to study simplified, traditional, or both?" etc.

I really recommend the basic Hanvon (汉王) tablets - they're generally cheaper than Wacom's, and still work with Skritter.

I can also vouch for 汉王. I bought the cheapest one in the shop, about 300 kuai, and its still going strong a year later.

The first tablet I tried out (don't remember the brand name) didn't work with Skritter because it only worked for handwriting recognition (unless the guys at the shop just didn't know how to change to the proper settings for regular pen-input mode). When I tried it, I asked for a 写字板, whereas I used the term 画板 with the Wacom guys, though I don't know for sure if that difference in terminology would stand up at a place where they only sell Chinese brands that I wouldn't have recognized.

Shinyspoons - How does the 汉王 stand up against a Wacom for non-Skritter use? Does it have a quality handwriting recognition mode/program ala Bamboo Scribe or pressure sensitivity? I ask because I, and probably a lot of other Skritterers, like to get a little more value out of my tablet than just using it for Skritter, so I draw with it in Gimp, use it to navigate around or play point-and-click adventure games, and use Bamboo Scribe from time to time instead of Google Pinyin for character input (and I'll add that Bamboo Scribe's 汉字 recognition is superior to the Chinese 写字板 that I tried, though the Chinese tablet supported direct input without the trouble of writing into a pad and then entering it into the text field like Bamboo Scribe requires). If I couldn't do those things well with a cheaper tablet then the 130 RMB premium on the Wacom Bamboo seems like a bargain compared to paying less and getting less.

Hanvon, cool, thanks. I like the idea of a Wizard that walks you through all the different settings and gets you started though we'll need to do it in a way that doesn't scare people off (too many options --> bad) or take too long. Thanks!

I would suggest hiding all the pinyin, reading, definition study from a beginner user. (Not really hidden, just behind the sofa.) Skritter's strongest, coolest function is the character writing. The other parts are important, but it's the writing that, I believe, sells the site. Once someone gets the hang of that, then they can explore some of the other features.

It might be helpful to have Skritter introduce some of the other features (i.e., have a little blurb when you log in) over a new user's first couple weeks.

I think I spoke to soon, two minutes after praising it, I went to use my 汉王 and for no apparent reason it got really hot and then broke. But that aside, i would still recommend it - I bought exactly the same model as a replacement - a whole year of skrittering for 300 kuai is not bad.

@FatDragon having never used a Wacom I cannot make a comparison, from what I can guess I think the Wacom would win hands down. If you cannot easily get your hands on a Wacom and are only using it for skritter, then a 汉王 is pretty cool, otherwise you will probably find something better somewhere else.

@jww1066: We already sort of have a wizard on signup. You can see what it's currently like here:

http://www.skritter.com/welcome

It used to be a little more complicated, with school validation (moved into the signup page) and textbook list selection (took that out and made the practice navigation page point new users to the vocabulary pages). We could add more things but as Doug said, we want to keep things simple.

@davidhm21: I'd be hesitant to keep some parts off when new users come in. This is mainly because it's more complicated to add parts than to remove them. The way the system currently works, if you add from a list with one part, then enable another part halfway through, the added part will only be studied for the latter half of the list. To study all parts for a list, a user would have to tell the list to start over from the beginning. But removing parts is easier; you just turn them off and they simply stop coming up for practice. This is something that needs to be fixed anyway, we just need to figure out how best to do it!

I do kind of like the idea of showing tips over the course of the user's first few visits. Again, would have to be careful to make sure these tips aren't annoying or too much, and can be easily disabled, but they could introduce things like the settings and active lists buttons on the practice page.

@scott the complaint was that Skritter showed tones, definitions, and pinyin, but he just wanted to study characters; I don't see a way to configure that through that page, or even a hint that such a setting exists. To change that he would have had to go to the settings page, which new users are unlikely to do, and in his case he was apparently simply unaware that it was an option.

This is semantics, but to me that welcome page is a perfect non-wizard because all of the basic options are on a single page. The whole point of a wizard is to reduce the complexity of each individual page by splitting them up into multiple pages, particularly when there is branching logic.

It's extraordinarily simple to turn off testing of the other things, it's instantly obvious just by hitting the settings gadget.

Surprised that was an issue?

Actually, I think it would be pretty difficult to quickly evaluate a new type of tablet. I'm quite happy with the Wacom now, but it was pretty frustrating to me until I managed to get all the settings adjusted to a Skritter-friendly configuration. And when we bought a second one (being a husband and wife team), it *still* took me a while to track down all the settings again and get them right. I hope the instructions for all of this are easy for a new user to find these days, but of course, I haven't looked lately. And Win 7 is organized differently than XP, say, so having OS specific instructions could be important. I know you guys have a lot on your plate, but it does seem that getting new users through some of these issues quickly and painlessly is important to getting them hooked.
Of course, anyone with the perseverance to deal with this language might be expected to push through quite a few barriers... :)

I'm not sure there is a good Wacoms setting resource is there?

http://www.skritter.com/wacoms/settings

This was on the wacom store page (although not the resources page).

Oh nice, cool!