I was just thinking about how I'm looking forward to some of the upcoming features when I realised that for someone who is just joining, it might all be a bit much. Right now I think it should still be quite doable, but once there are things like radical breakdowns per character and "force buttons" it might slowly get a bit much together with numbers about "readiness of a character", green-arrow click in the window for the next character, setting individual retention rate, adding special characters....

I don't know how easily that would be doable, but it might be good to just have the basic functions, i.e. writing a character and tone, for people who are absolute newcomers and just want to find out what skritter is about (I know that when I am just browsing and find something new, I don't want to spend 1 hour registering "for free" and then spend another hour on a tour....I want to enter the page and start doing:). After a short while they could then be encouraged to take the "learn more" or "adjust skritter to your needs" which activates all the other cool features.

Maybe it's a bit early to be thinking about this, but it might be something to keep in mind.

David

I think its difficult for old users to comment on this, features were different when we joined. Grabbing a random student and showing them may be the best way to see if the process is beginner friendly.
Its important to differentiate between the features that add value for experienced users but are not necessary for beginners with features that complicate the actual process. Extra statistics and the option to set your own target retention rate doesn't affect the difficulty a new user faces. The basic task is still the same "read pinyin, write word".

I've decided the reason why adding lists is so difficult for beginners is because they don't understand how skritter works. There needs to be an explanation of how Skritter occasionally grabs the next word from your list. Its still not clear what you are adding words to or why you are adding them.

On another note, the front page annoys me! When I log in from another computer. I am bombarded with the choice of "Sign me up" OR "Try it now"
Its a difficult decision to make when I want to log in!!!

Good points all around.

It's not too early to think about this, because already we've been finding new users have a difficult time, so it's been a pretty major concern recently. We took it to Oberlin students and they got destroyed by the old list system, which is why we made a new one, but we haven't had a chance to test that on newbies to see how they fare.

Here's a basic run down of what we've done and what we plan to do:

* Remake the vocab list page: done for now, but will probably go through a few more revisions as we try to make it as intuitive as possible. Adding explanation for how words are added gradually rather than all at once could be done in a future iteration. We probably won't get to this one at least until next month; this is simply an ongoing project.

* Make a better welcome page that streamlines the process of getting to the practice page: done. You can check it out at:

http://www.skritter.com/welcome

This is what users see right after they first register. These steps we figure are key to getting done before you start practicing. Everything else can be explored and figured out later, so these are presented first then users are forwarded on to the practice page.

* Do better at redirecting users to the vocab list page if they haven't added anything yet: not done. Currently if a user makes it to the practice page without having added anything yet, they get one cryptic message in the flash window about adding words that goes away like all error messages in the flash window. We need something a little more forceful and explanatory to make it clear the flash page isn't broken, it's just not ready for you yet until you get this other step done.

* Make a try it page which walks you through the basic process: half done. You can see the current tryit page here:

http://www.skritter.com/tryit

Currently it gives the user helpful messages when you hover your mouse over something. The problem is they show up in the upper left corner, and often go unnoticed. Also there's no systematic introduction to the system. We're thinking we'll make a basic walkthrough that introduces new users to the practice page. They write a simple character or three, then do a tone, and there are tutorial bubbles that show up pointing out the buttons to click, and describing what certain things mean. People mistake the tryit page for the real thing, too, so having it be more tutorialish with a message at the end saying to register to get practicing for real should fix that.

* Quickstart guide and Userguide: both done for now but could use improvement. We're going to try and trim down the quickstart guide and make it a bit more graphical.

So that's the basic overview of our 'help new users out' strategy. It's half complete at this point; what do you guys think? It's true, it's harder for old users to comment but it's doubly so for us who work on it all the time and of course know how to use the very thing we built. So if you have any friends you want to introduce to Skritter, why not watch them as they get started to see where the stumbling points are and drop us a line? We'd really appreciate it if you did.

And we'll work on the front page! That's true it isn't really geared toward returning users.

Regarding the front page, I think I got used to on Skritter as well as some other sites to click on the Login button/link on the upper right corner or in some other tiny part of the page. This is because other sites have primed me to look there that it's not a problem for me now.

The Welcome page is nice. Two minor points:

- The "Textbooks" and "HSK" links should go to the corresponding sections of the vocab page. Right now, they just drop you at the top-level vocab page.

- "HSK" might need a bit of explanation. Lots of people won't know what this means.

I've added an acronym tag to HSK on the welcome page. This is the second or third obscure HTML tag that Maksym has suggested that I'd never heard of before. Perhaps when he gets here, we'll wake up one day to find everything covered in wbr's and ruby's.