Hello everyone!
I have a problem with 2 beta. Some times Skritter when I choose 1,2,3,or 4 when I don’t know or know so-so a word, skip a character a word etc and jump to the next one from the revision list without my permission. So I am obliged to skip quite a lot of words.
I hope you find a solution.
A second topic: Skritter is much more faster but if we try to watch a second time the word in the dictionary or simply the components of the word he doesn’t charge any more. So you have only one try!
Hope you will find a solution!
Have a nice day!
Just a heads up, this bug is extremely pervasive in the new 2.2.5, perhaps due to the new auto-advance. I just temporarily left the beta program because this happened nearly every time I selected 1/2/4 with the writing prompt.
Thanks for the reports! We recommend disabling auto-advance for now in the beta (in your study settings) until it’s patched up.
Here is a link to the most recent dev notes: Developer Release Notes--May 15th, 2017
The grading buttons issue should be patched up now on the web and available soon for Android. If anyone hasn’t tried the grading buttons out in the beta yet, please give it a go! It is a deviation from what was happening before, but even with auto-advance off it should make for an even quicker review process. Please let us know what you think!
Confusingly there are two sets of study settings and they aren’t the same! One from the main menu and one from the study page. The auto advance prompt setting is only available from the settings on the main menu.
Even with the setting turned off, using the grading buttons still jumps a character. So, on or off, makes no difference.
Your timing is impeccable. We just discussed this in our last meeting and are figuring out a way to make it less confusing. At the very least, the two areas shouldn’t use the same terminology “Study settings” making it even more confusing, and ideally, it should be very apparent there are two areas to change settings (if there are going to be two distinct areas), and they should be easily accessible to reach them, without having to know the specifics of navigating to the “account study settings” versus the “study study settings”… where one may find one area and not delve into another without realizing a different set of “study settings” even exist, let alone with some different options, yet the same name. Not very intuitive!
Thanks for letting us know about this. In that case, you may have to revert back to the original Android build by opting out of the beta participation while it’s being patched up. Here’s a link to a guide: Help Scout - Log In
(You can jump ahead to the “leaving the beta” section).
In case you need some feedback … I think that the study settings should be available from the study page - for ease of access; the other settings page should exclude the study settings, since having them twice is confusing, especially when they are different!
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I am also experiencing this problem, but noticing that Skritter will often jump to the next word when I have yet to finish writing a word. So after selecting (1,2,3,4) for the first character in a multiple character word, I will then be jumped to the next word. This is often followed up by another quick automatic skip, and then I cannot navigate back to the original word to finish it.
This is also with the “auto advance” feature unchecked in my study settings. It also occurs when it is checked as well.
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The issue is currently being fixed! In the meantime, you could use the legacy version of the site (https://legacy.skritter.com), or the original non-beta build of the Android app (by opting out of the beta participation on Skritter’s page on the Play Store). Sorry for the inconvience.
I don’t know if it’s related or not but the back button has disappeared part way through a session. I can only go forward. And maybe I’m missing something obvious but how do I clear a char to practice writing it again after the grading prompts have appeared?
It appears that the latest beta has fixed the issue with automatically jumping extra words, but it still auto-advances to the next word after grading, even if auto-advance is turned off.
It seems to me that it’s possible to go back by tapping where the back button should have been, but if this is on purpose, it’s way too subtle in my opinion.
I think you can swipe upwards from the bottom of the drawing area to erase, but I’d much prefer a button.
Auto advance moves on to the next prompt without selecting a grade, where with auto advance off, you can sit and ponder on the prompt after you’re finished with it, until you tap on the canvas to move on, (or manually select a grade which also moves to the next prompt).
This is intentional, so that there’s less stuff going on on the canvas besides the actual prompt. A nice tutorial should solve it’s subtleness!
Can you please consider not doing that, or at least make it optional? I’m sometimes a bit uncertain about how to grade, and I consistently want to get get that out of the way before studying the character in order to memorize it. As long as a tap anywhere is all it takes to move to the next character, I really fail to see the need for automatically advancing here.
I disagree. There are too many magic strokes that do stuff, upwards to erase, tapping in special places to navigate. Unless you do this a lot, you will inevitably end up having to try to recall how to perform a given action. It might make the UI look sleek and elegant, but it makes for a bad and clumsy UX.
Right! With auto advance off, the prompt won’t automatically advance. You can sit and ponder on the prompt indefinitely, until you decide to move on. You can decide to move on by either tapping the canvas, (which keeps the current grading), or by selecting the grade you want to choose. So in this scenario where you are uncertain about how to grade it, you can sit on the prompt until you’ve become certain, and then select the grade. The grade selection action both chooses the grade, and takes you to the next prompt since you’re done with it.
The behavior with the back button on the canvas is actually how the iOS app currently works as well. I do see what you’re saying though, and we’ll try to make actions that can be taking more obvious. There’s currently an interactive tutorial in the works which should prove very helpful for new Skritterers to learn how things work.
My point is that I’m doing two things here, grading, then memorizing. My natural workflow isn’t supported. I might be the only one, but I suspect that’s not the case. 
I’m not new, and I believe I’m pretty decent at figuring out tricky UIs. The fact that the iOS version does this is not a sensible rationale, as long as you control this UI too (unless there are UI requirements or technical limitations there prohibiting buttons there). I’d recommend the book “Don’t Make me think”. 
Ah I see what you mean! Is memorizing then grading an unacceptable adjustment to the flow? It seems like that might be the same end result, instead just changing when you toggle the grade to after you’re done memorizing, versus grading first, then spending the time thinking about the prompt.
A copy is sitting on my bookshelf! Though I should probably give it a read over again…
You make a good point that the iOS version doesn’t justify the same behavior moving forward, even more so that the iOS app is being replaced with the 2.0 client. I think my point might have been that it hasn’t really been mentioned it being unintuitive tricky on iOS, but if we can figure out a much more apparent behavior for triggering going back and advancing a prompt we’ll make sure it’s set up that way! We felt there was a lot of stuff going on and the canvas, and the arrows can be distracting, but it’s not set completely in stone yet, and as you mention it’s not very intuitive and needs to be a learned/trained action.
Unfortunately, it’s not the same. Grading makes sense (to me) as an extension to the attempt at the character. Then, when I’ve gotten that out of the way, I can study the character and try to memorize it. Otherwise, you have to revisit the attempt after memorizing, which I find to be an unnatural workflow.
To clarify: consider the attempt at the character as activity A, and the memorizing of the character as activity B. The natural workflow (for me, I’m biased ;-)) is A, then B. However, that isn’t supported unless I move to the next character, and then navigate back (which has also become more difficult as the buttons are gone), and this is actuallywhat I do. The workflow that is more or less enforced here is A, then B and then revisit A again.
Why do you consider the arrows distracting?
Presumptuous, but some ideas, in case you’re interested (and you may of course have considered these):
You could add swipe actions above the canvas area. This would also be less intuitive than buttons, but it would be harder to make mistakes. As the canvas expects input, having invisible buttons there is error prone. If you actually slid the next task in, you’d actually make this more intuitive, but it’d have to be quick.
You could also move the buttons above the canvas area.
A third alternative is to add a pop-up or slide-in menu with various actions, like navigating, erase, undo(?) etc, something along the lines of the info button. You could also just add this to the info screen.
You could combine some of the above, having a “pro” swipe action and a newbie open a menu, tap a button option.
And of course, you could ignore whiny users. 
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I have to say I agree with this workflow, of first attempting the character, then looking at it (or reading the example sentence, or whatever) to try to memorize it, then moving on. In the iOS app, I very often find myself trying to stop the prompt from advancing, and if I do want to advance right away, I find myself manually advancing before the auto-advance happens.
I just realized why this is unintuitive. Consider the grading a set of radio buttons. You’ve just made an attempt at a character, and one of the radio buttons is checked, but it’s the wrong one. You want to fix that before you move on to the next task, which just happens to be memorizing the strokes or reading up on the details of the word / character. When you’re done with this next task, you want to move on to the next and it’s easy to forget to adjust the grade.
Second reason that it’s unintuitive is that it’s a radio button, and it also doubles as a submit button. If you have a very simple UI that only has a set of radio button and nothing else, you might get away with that, but this is a complex UI, and that gets too magic.
Hmm, these are valid points. Though we haven’t envisioned a better method (yet, and will consider your suggestions!), I can’t argue with the logic you’ve presented and agree this is probably the source of the unintuitiveness. Because a grading option is presented, it does make it seem like radio buttons, which shouldn’t double as a submit button, and if the automatic grading was wrong and you wanted to change that immediately, it’d cause the prompt to advance. Right now it might seem like the first time changing the grade would show that it accomplishes both actions, but that also does force someone to go with how the system is set up versus how they might expect it to be set up. We’ll need to think about this one more!