Auto Advance Explained (with updates for 3.0.8!)

The largest reason for the change (all the changes, really) is the need to make the Skritter experience consistent across all platforms. We have been dealing the technical debt of supporting three very different platforms and experiences for a very long time and it’s killing our ability to improve the overall Skritter experience. We’re a small team and having three apps working in three different ways doesn’t make sense for our team, or for the brand–not to mention the fact that many users jump between platforms often during the day.

We can improve the auto-advance experience, and we will continue to do so, but if we’re going to take Skritter to the next level, we’ve gotta be able to work off of a single source of truth. That is one of the primary goals of the new mobile. We realize that this process is going to take some time, and we recognize that this app is not old-iOS. It’s the main reason we decided to support two versions of the iOS app for now.

Furthermore, user interviews and feedback over the years would suggest that a large number of Skritter users are learning things they’ve never encountered before on Skritter. When we get feedback like that (and we get a lot of feedback about that), it made us realize that the review tool we built really needs to be a teaching tool, and we’re trying to put auto-advance into that context. Finding a balance between super fast (for pure review), and super useful (for learning) is something we’re still working on improving.

From a learning context, having to go back is bad. Keeping info about various words straight in your head is hard enough. Add in the fact that you’re writing characters and words, or guessing at tones you’re not sure of and accidental taps and the like start occurring at a greater frequency.

3.0.8 auto-advance tries to address that by having as consistent of an experience as possible on all card types-- the first tap on non-grading areas pauses the auto-advance (if fired). Taps on grades move auto-advance forward based on the grade given. In my opinion, grading buttons shouldn’t be both a grade and a pause event, which is the main change from old-iOS.

Flow is obviously going to be a bit subjective, and we’ll continue to work on giving varying degrees of control where we can. One thing that didn’t make it into 3.0.8 auto-advance is the ability to set default duration of time for things marked “got it.” We are not opposed to adding that level of control, but we wanted to make sure that the underlying behaviors are working well first.

I hope that helps answer your question and put some of the changes into a larger context. Also, I’m personally on build 40 of the new Skritter Mobile, and I’m in the opposite boat at this point. Old-iOS behavior feels strange to me, so I really do appreciate all of the feedback from you and others who are less attached to some of the things Josh and I might consider as “normal.”

Quick question as I wrap up this lengthy reply, what is your old-iOS app auto-advance speed set to? As I said above, we’re not opposed to offering some level of control to how fast things move, but we wanted to get the underlying behaviours correct first.

-Jake

@SkritterJake, thanks for the detailed reply. I really appreciate the candor.

My old iOS app uses 1.2s as the auto-advance time, and I mark a lot of things “so-so”.

When I stopwatch the auto-advance on the new app (admittedly only 6 times), the time from when I mark things or do the last stroke to the next prompt seems to clock in between 0.25 to 0.5 sec more than the values you quoted earlier in this thread. Perhaps it’s related to the laggy writing bug that will be fixed in the next beta.

You’re very welcome.

Thanks for letting me know about your speed setting. Do things feel better on 3.0.9 version? Hopefully, some of the performance issues have been resolved and you get a better idea of the indented behavior of Skritter Mobile auto-advance.

Let us know how it feels and how you think we can make it better and we’ll keep working on it :slight_smile:

-Jake

Two comments:

  • For me, 3.0.9 did fix the laggy advance for me (i.e. sometimes it took longer than 1.5s for “got it” to advance.
  • I used 0.9s for auto-advance in the past, so the current 1.5s in v3.0.9 feels way too slow, which is the biggest reason reviewing in current app feels slow to me. I do think we need to have the setting added back.

Great! We will continue to look for ways to boost performance in the app. I know Josh has some more tricks up his sleeve. Quick note for others, we’re also investing in some older devices that have been reporting lots of bugs we can’t reproduce just yet. Should help us fix them immensely :slight_smile:

We agree. Internal testing uncovered some more bugs with tap events and have been borking things more than we’d like. The fix is taking priority and we hope to roll out 3.0.10 asap for that. We’ll do what we can to have more speed control in version 3.0.11 or 3.0.12. Stay tuned!

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I too think that the new auto-advance time settings are too slow. I study far fewer words in a given length of time in the new versions that in the old (iOS) app.

Have you considered different lengths of times depending on the type of review being done? For example if I get a tone wrong, then I don’t think I need as much time before auto advance as I would do if I write a character incorrectly. A tone is kind-of a “one stroke character”, and takes little time to review compared to a ten plus stroke character.

@meishala The auto advance time amount setting will be added back in!

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