New Hints 💡

[merleschoen]

During user testing for my research project and thesis, I've received some feedback about the hints in our exercises. It seems like people don't find them very helpful. We have also discussed hints in relation to different exercises like the TranslateWhatYouHear issue.

I’ve been thinking about a simple solution that could enhance the user experience: a hangman-style hint system.
When users click on Hint, we could display the number of letters needed. This would be particularly useful when users miss something minor, like an article, and it would help us avoid any language-specific issues with hints.

The system could work like this: users would get three "lives." The first hint would reveal the number of letters in the answer and the stars, while the next two could reveal two random letters from the word or just the first two. We can keep our existing feedback messages and place them next to the stars/lives and make the UI less cluttered by removing the emojis.

It could look something like this:

One small challenge is that we’d need to use a monospaced font for the input field so the dashes clearly represent letters. I’ve looked into a few options, and I think Source Code Pro (pictured) would work nicely—it is similar to Montserrat, so the visual difference wouldn’t be too noticeable.

I’d love to hear your thoughts @mircealungu @tfnribeiro !

[tfnribeiro]

I think this would be a good solution to the Writing input hint issue, as it would cover a lot of our current issues with the hint system, e.g. number of words, how many letters should be part of the word and what letters should be in.

One thing to think about is if we show the dashes and they remain in the interface, and if we give them letters we should not permit the user to delete the letter, for example.