At the beginning of the year the Skritter team started working with a designer to completely overhaul the Skritter experience and bring a more modern look and feel to our application. For months we’ve been referencing “Skritter 2.0” on the forums but we’ve been fairly closed mouthed about what’s been going on. Today, we’re ending the silence and letting you get your hands on what we’ve been working on.
The beta version of the site is now being hosted on html5.skritter.com. We would love for users to check out the site and provide us with feedback. At the moment the html5 site is only aimed at desktop browsers and we’ve been testing using the latest of Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari. The link will direct you to the login page, where you’ll need to reenter your Skritter username and password. After that you’ll be taken to the new Skritter dashboard!
The entire site is gathering information from our servers so it might take a few seconds to load all of your information. We’ll be working on speeding up this process (and adding some load indicators) as we gather more data from users. Before you press the Study button, please be sure to set a Daily Goal!
Daily goals, and the monthly progress heat map are some of the biggest updates to the interface. We’re working to transform Skritter into a daily tool that helps guide you on your path to character mastery. You can set a time goal or an item goal, but you wont be able to do both. Once your daily goal all setup, you’ll be ready to jump onto the study page. It will take a little time for the server to fetch prompt data, so please be patient while it loads (again, load indicators are on their way). Visualization of the daily goal is already designed and will be added into the study page shortly.
The study page might seem a little baron for now, but all the prompt types work. Give us time to add in all of the additional features that you’re used to seeing on the Skritter website, they’re coming soon! For now, we’d really appreciate if you’d spend some time studying on the new site and give us your feedback along the way.
Speaking of feedback, here’s what we’re really looking for:
- What do you think of the Daily Goal?
- How does the new design look and feel?
- Does the streak counter help motivate you to study more often?
- Bug reports
You can submit feedback by using the Contact button located at the top of the page. We’ve separated things into two separate sections: Feedback, and Bug Report so please try to sort your comments into those categories. As mentioned on the the contact form “All submissions will be read and analyzed by the Skritter team and we’ll be working hard to making improvements. We’ll be sure to get in touch if we need additional follow-up information.”
Thank you in advance for helping us to test the future of Skritter, and for your patience in the process. For now, go forth to Skritter 2.0 and enjoy!
(This section will be updated as we continue to make progress on the site)
Current Limitations
The current beta will only allow users to view the dashboard and study page. You will have to manage vocabulary, lists, etc. from the Flash version of the site. Once the other pages, views, settings etc. are ready for testing we’ll put them on the new site. We promise it will be worth the wait!
In Development
Before anyone starts sending reports about what’s missing, or what’s not working, here’s a list of things that we’ll have up and running in short order:
- Daily Goal Display on Study Page
- Single Character Pinyin Spacing (for characters with multiple readings)
- Swipe-Up to erase
- Automatic Audio
- Teaching Mode button
- Right/Wrong Grading Button
- Item adding plus button
- Keyboard Navigation
- Writing prompt auto grading